


Lost Time

by nickel710



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Chronic Illness, Drinking, F/F, Hospitals, IVs and monitors, M/M, Medical Procedures, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Public Display of Affection, Steve is still Captain America, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Super Soldier Serum, modern!Bucky, not quite shrunkyclunks, precious pit bull puppy, the PTSD is not a big part of the story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21783634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickel710/pseuds/nickel710
Summary: “Lost time?” Sam prompted.“Oh. No, it’s just—”“It’s just what you call it when you space out like that?” Sam guessed, eyebrows high. Steve shouldered past him and made his way back to the kitchen, noticing that he was ravenous now that his bladder didn’t feel like it might explode. “Steve. Does this happen… a lot?”“Not a lot,” Steve protested, realizing too late that this wasnotgoing to be as reassuring to Sam as he meant.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 41
Kudos: 197





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh dear what's this, it must be the most stressful time of the year again because here I am stress-writing fanfiction!
> 
> Anyway, hi! This work is mostly complete, and I usually post very frequently! Like... every morning! It will probably be ~30k when complete, with 23k already written. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! I love reading your comments, please don't hesitate or be shy if you want to say something! I do have a tumblr that I barely update but would be happy to talk to you on over @nickel710

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear what's this, it must be the most stressful time of the year again because here I am stress-writing fanfiction!
> 
> Anyway, hi! This work is mostly complete, and I usually post very frequently! Like... every morning! It will probably be ~30k when complete, with 23k already written. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! I love reading your comments, please don't hesitate or be shy if you want to say something! I do have a tumblr that I barely update but would be happy to talk to you on over @nickel710

The first time it happened was on the battlefield.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. It had been happening a lot since he’d thawed out, but the first time that it happened when it _mattered_ was on the battlefield.

He had taken down several Chitauri soldiers right as one of their grenades blasted him out of a building—a bank, maybe?— and for a second, his mind blanked.

He just stood there as paramedics, firefighters, and other first responders rushed around, directing civilians, detritus from the battle overhead falling around him like erupted volcanic rock. 

That had been years ago, and now Steve had a phrase for those little blank moments: Lost Time. Usually, he could backwards engineer what had happened during his lost time—as far as he could tell, the answer was always the same: nothing. A whole lot of nothing. His best guess was that if he could see himself during lost time, he’d just be standing there, staring at nothing, doing nothing. Just like in the Battle of New York.

The longest he had lost was, he thought, about seventeen minutes. That was an outlier, for sure. Usually Lost Time amounted to a few seconds, and the majority of the data points clustered between 10 and 90 seconds. At least, as best he could tell.

Sometimes, he mused as he sat at his kitchen table, staring into a coffee mug that he had emptied without really tasting, he wished he could lose more time.

* * *

“Steve?”

He blinked, eyes focusing. Sam’s face was uncomfortably close to his own—when had Sam gotten there? He had been hanging out with Natasha at the Tower, and… and….

“Hey, buddy,” Sam said, smiling, but the smile did not convince Steve that things were fine. It was one of those tight, concerned smiles that Sam put on to hide when he was worried. “You okay?” 

“What?” Steve asked, taking a step back and trying to figure out why he was suddenly disoriented. “Where did Nat go?”

“She left an hour ago.”

Steve frowned. “An hour? But we were just having lunch.”

“Steve, it’s almost 10:00. 2200. You’ve been kinda… out of it.”

“For nine hours?” Steve demanded. 

“Apparently.”

“What… what was I doing?”

“Nothing, really,” Sam said slowly, frowning. “You just kinda sat there. I wanted to take you to the hospital but Nat wouldn’t let me.”

Steve blew out a sigh, standing with a wince as he realized he had to go to the bathroom. Urgently. He stumbled a little as he pushed past Sam to make it to the toilet. 

“Jesus,” Sam muttered, and Steve turned to see that his friend had followed him down the hall. “You sound like a horse.”

Steve couldn’t help but snort a laugh at that. “You have a lot of experience with urinating horses, Sam?”

“It’s just something people say, man. I can’t believe you didn’t wet yourself during your little nine hour space cadet audition.”

“Lost time,” Steve corrected without thinking.

Sam stared at him as he zipped his pants, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands. He stared at him harder as Steve dried his hands and turned to try to leave the bathroom, but found his path blocked by his, yes, still staring friend.

“What?”

“Lost time?” Sam prompted.

“Oh. No, it’s just—”

“It’s just what you call it when you space out like that?” Sam guessed, eyebrows high. Steve shouldered past him and made his way back to the kitchen, noticing that he was ravenous now that his bladder didn’t feel like it might explode. “Steve. Does this happen… a lot?”

“Not a lot,” Steve protested, realizing too late that this was _not_ going to be as reassuring to Sam as he meant.

And indeed, when Sam demanded, “How often is ‘not a lot?’”, his voice had raised a full octave.

Steve stuffed his head into the fridge, looking for something that could be eaten cold. Pickles. Cheese. That would do.

Taking a big bite of a full dill pickle, he turned back to Sam with pickle jar in one hand and cheese block in the other. “Nah-ah-ma!”

“Seriously, you are a grown ass man,” Sam said, snatching the cheese from his hand. “Chew your food and answer me like an adult.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but did as he was told. “I said, ‘not that much,’” he said.

“Stop being vague and tell me the truth, Steve. Please.” While he waited for an answer, Sam unwrapped the cheese and broke a piece off for himself before putting it on the table between them.

Fine, if Sam wanted not vague, Steve could deliver. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, gave Sam a meaningful look when he started to protest, and tapped on the screen a bit before turning it to face Sam.

“A spreadsheet. God, how do you know more about google sheets than…” Sam trailed off, eyes narrowing as he started to scroll on the screen and realized what he was seeing.

“You track the episodes,” he murmured.

“Lost time. Yeah. I track it. This is the first time it’s ever been so long.”

“That you know of,” Sam pointed out.

“True, but it’s not like it’s easy to miss when I miss this many hours. Even if you hadn’t been here, I would have noticed that nine hours passed.”

“Okay,” Sam sighed, “that is really not the point.” 

“You said—”

“Forget what I said. Steve, this isn’t normal.”

“Well, yeah.”

“No, I mean, it’s not even normal within parameters of PTSD.”

Steve blinked. PTSD? “Sam, I don’t—”

“Steve Rogers, if you try to tell me you don’t have PTSD, I swear.”

Steve snapped his jaw shut, turning his focus onto his cheese block and breaking off a chunk. Sam reached over and took another piece for himself. When Steve did not offer any further comment, Sam sighed, still holding the cheese.

“Look, Steve. I know we’ve talked about this and I know what you say about it, but let me put it this way. When people ‘lose time,’ as you put it, because of PTSD or psychosis, they usually _do_ something. It’s often something like… like… okay, say I had a psychotic break. I’d, like, I dunno, go to a club and hook up with someone in an unsafe way. I dunno. Losing time with PTSD usually looks like a breakdown. Flashbacks. Hallucinations. Paranoia. Am I checking any boxes for your particular brand of lost time?”

“No,” Steve said. He’d seen TV episodes of various shows where soldiers with PTSD became convinced something like a car backfiring was evidence that they were back in a warzone. He didn’t know how accurate that was to what Sam was talking about, but he hadn’t been running around New York or DC sure that he was in Germany again. “I don’t think I do anything during my lost time.”

“Exactly. I don’t… I don’t know what any of this means,” Sam sighed. “We need to have Dr. Banner look at you, maybe he’ll have some ideas.”

“Are any of Bruce’s doctorates actually medical?" Steve wondered aloud as Sam popped his cheese into his mouth finally. Steve was on his second pickle. 

Sam waved this concern away, saying around a mouthful of aged cheddar, “The man knows e’rything.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “You’re an adult Sam, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

* * *

Bruce looked over the spreadsheet, frowning. “And Sam said none of this is consistent with PTSD?”

“Why does everyone think I have PTSD?” Steve muttered. 

Bruce glanced up from the data, looking at Steve with a somewhat surprised expression. “Seriously?” he asked.

Steve huffed.

“Okay, I’m definitely not qualified to respond to that,” Bruce said, turning back to the spreadsheets. “This data is only so useful without knowing how accurate it is. We should set up a monitoring system, figure out how to keep track of this more exactly.”

“What? No. I don’t want a babysitter watching every time I daydream.”

“Not a babysitter, and not daydreaming. Maybe… something more like Jarvis.”

Steve sighed, standing up from where he’d been perched on the edge of a nearby desk. “Thanks anyway, Bruce,” he said as he started toward the door.

“No, wait. Steve! Wait.” 

Steve stopped in the doorframe, turning back to his friend with surprise at how alarmed Bruce sounded. Bruce was standing now, coming around his desk to follow Steve.

“I… you have to understand, I don’t say that we should monitor this lightly. I… this could be very bad, Steve. I don’t have enough information, but my honest advice is you need a team of doctors on this. Seriously. You need help, possibly urgently.”

Steve was taken aback by this. Until this moment, the lost time had meant little to him. Nine hours had been alarming enough to get him to Bruce’s doorstep, sure, but Bruce made it sound like he had cancer.

A sudden shiver of icy dread ran down his spine. “Do you think I’m dying?” he asked.

Bruce shrugged helplessly. “I’m saying, I don’t have any clear ideas yet. But a symptom like this… it’s not telling me you have an innocent little head cold. That’s what I’m saying.”

“So what now?” Steve asked.

“Now… we research.”

* * *

It turned out ‘research’ meant a lot of things that Steve did not anticipate. He had imagined libraries, journals, readings. The internet. Medical journals. And they did consult those things, but Bruce also researched _Steve_. Blood tests, DNA mapping, CT scans, even allergy testing. And then an argument over— 

“—a psychological exam, Bruce!” Steve snarled. “It’s absurd!”

“It’s not absurd,” Bruce said calmly, face and tone placid. “It’s an important part of this process. There is clearly a psychological factor involved in this, and a psychiatrist can—”

“You and Sam already agreed it’s not PTSD causing this!” Steve protested.

“No, we speculated that based on our knowledge about the condition,” Bruce corrected. “Neither Sam nor I can make that call, officially. Well, neither of us should. A psychiatrist should rule that out, being trained medical experts in diagnosing psychological conditions.”

“I don’t have PTSD,” Steve said, for the millionth time.

“Then what are you so worried about? Just see a psychiatrist and get it over with.”

* * *

Steve totally had PTSD.

He didn’t want to talk about it.

* * *

“We have to talk about it,” Sam said.

“Why?” Steve complained. 

“Because Dr. Ganesh agreed that your lost time is inconsistent with your other PTSD symptoms, and that means we need to understand what else is going on in your noggin to see if there’s some other psychological cause.”

Before Steve had a chance to respond, his phone buzzed and Steve tapped the “answer” button, activating the speaker phone. 

“Tony,” he greeted. “You’re on speaker. Sam’s here.”

“Hey, Wings,” Tony acknowledged, then, in typical Tony fashion, said without preamble, “Heard about your time problem, Cap.” Steve glared at Sam, who put his hands up and gave the universal “it wasn’t me!” gesture/expression combo. Tony continued, unaware of this drama unfolding, “I think I found something.”

“What? What do you mean, found something?”

“I mean, it turns out there’s some top secret government tests happening on a base out in Texas where soldiers have episodes that sound similar to what you’re experiencing, and the shrinks out there don’t think it’s PTSD.”

Steve stared at the phone in disbelief for a minute, then up at Sam, who shrugged. “Seriously? Why is this being investigated by the military but Bruce and I have found nothing in any medical journals or hospital reports?”

“That sounds like the kind of question we can ask when we go to Texas. Get your bag.”

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A trip to Fort Sam Houston.

The next morning, Sam, Steve, Bruce, and Tony made their way to Fort Sam Houston. The night before, Tony had taken them around San Antonio, and Steve had to admit, the city was nothing like he’d expected. Although he’d traveled all over the country, both before and after the ice, he seldom had opportunities to sight-see. It was always, dance on this stage, pose for these photos, or destroy that alien army. So yeah, spending a little time with his friends wandering the River Walk and listening to mariachis serenade a young couple who had just gotten engaged was pretty nice.

At Fort Sam, they stopped at the gate as was normal for army bases. This was another experience Steve had that was slightly different from his usual: instead of being there for an expected, scheduled visit where they were greeted as guests of honor, Tony just rolled up in his rental car and pushed the visitor’s page button.

The screen lit up with the image of a young woman in army fatigues. “State your business,” she said in a bored tone.

“Hi, Tony Stark here,” Tony said, resting an arm on his rolled-down window and leaning out the window a bit so she could see his face better. She did a double-take, eyes widening a bit. “I’m here with Captain Rogers.”

“Captain… hang on,” she said, a little breathless, and the screen went blank.

“Seriously, Tony? That was your plan for getting us onto the base, just drop my name?” Steve said from the passenger seat, annoyed.

“I want shotgun on the way back,” Sam declared, apropo nothing.

“Don’t worry, Cap. It’ll work. Just give it a minute.” He turned to Sam. “You and Cap can arm wrestle for it.” Sam made a face.

The screen flickered back to life. This time, there was an older man whose shoulders and lapels bore officer markings. “Staff Sergeant Green,” he introduced himself. “What brings you to our base today, Mr. Stark?”

Tony gestured into the car. “Captain Rogers and I have some questions, very important government stuff.”

The man frowned a bit before the gate started to slide open. “I’ll meet you at the security checkpoint,” he said, nodding to them before the video feed cut out.

“You outrank that guy, right?” Tony said as they pulled through the gate.

Steve sighed. “If I were active duty, then yes. But he’s just going to take us to whatever Major is in charge, and then I wouldn’t. It doesn't matter, though, since I'm not really part of the army anymore.”

At the security checkpoint, Tony parked the car and the four of them stepped out into the warm autumn air. They did not have to wait long for Staff Sergeant Green to appear, flanked by the young woman who had first answered the buzzer. 

“Mr. Stark,” the man greeted, reaching out his hand to shake. “Can’t say I ever expected to meet you in person.” They shook, then Green turned his attention to Steve. He brought his hand up in a formal salute. “Captain Rogers. It’s an honor.”

Steve saluted casually. “Thanks,” he said awkwardly, still terrible at responding to people who would have probably beat him up as a kid, but now fumbled all over themselves to profess their respect for him.

Tony pointed to Sam. “Sam Wilson, Air Force pararescue or something. Dr. Bruce Banner.”

Green shook hands, eyes wide at Bruce. Sam barely got much of a glance. He’d told Steve that army and Air Force guys had some kind of rivalry, but this was the first time Steve had really seen it in action. As soon as the words “Air Force” slipped from Tony’s mouth, both Green and the woman had moved past him as if Tony had not introduced him.

“And this is Private First Class Gomez,” Green said, to finish out the introductions. Gomez nodded to everyone, but her gaze was returning to Steve consistently. “Follow me, gentlemen.”

They followed him into a building where a visitor’s desk was set up. They waited while Gomez signed them all in and printed temporary visitor badges with their faces and names. Groups of soldiers and civilian workers were milling about, making small talk as they made their way to their morning posts. Steve listened, but nobody seemed to notice that the group at the visitor’s desk was comprised of Avengers yet.

Green disappeared to find an officer, and Steve took the opportunity to gather his friends close. “I think this is a dead end, Tony,” he said in a low voice. “You had to snoop to find out anything about these tests; they’re not exactly itching to let the public know about whatever is going on.”

“I agree,” Bruce said. “If we want to find out about the tests, we can’t just let them give us the run-around.”

Tony was opening his mouth to respond when a quiet voice behind them said, “Captain Rogers?”

Steve turned to see PFC Gomez looking around nervously.

He stepped away from the group, concerned by the furtive looks she was casting. “Is everything alright, private?” he asked quietly.

She bit her lip. “Are you here about Project Icarus?”

He tilted his head. “Should I be?”

Gomez looked at her feet. “I know I shouldn’t say anything, but… my girlfriend, Paula Romano, joined Icarus and she’s… I think she’s very sick. I’m worried about her.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked, the hairs on the back of his neck stirring.

“I haven’t seen her in a few days,” Gomez admitted, “but before that we were having lunch in the city on our day off and she just… it was like she wasn’t there all of a sudden. It lasted a few minutes. I almost called 9-1-1.”

Steve’s heart clenched. “Where is Paula now?”

Gomez shook her head. “I don’t know, sir. She told me she had to check in with the Icarus staff when I told her what had happened, and she hasn’t texted me back or anything since then. It's not like her.”

Steve put a hand on Gomez’s shoulder reassuringly. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thank you, Captain Rogers,” Gomez said, brightening.

“Gomez!” a voice snapped. The private snapped to attention. “This isn’t social hour! Get back to your post.”

“Yes sir!” she answered briskly, returning to the desk and focusing on the computer.

Steve turned to greet the newcomer, another older man. “Major John Hastry,” the man said, sticking out his hand for Steve to shake. No salute from him.

“Major,” Steve greeted, shaking briefly. “Steve Rogers. You know Tony Stark, I presume.”

“Not personally,” the Major said, nodding to Tony. 

Steve finished introductions, then the Major said, “Staff Sergeant Green tells me you have some questions. What can I help you with?”

“We’ve been doing some surveys of medical equipment on bases,” Steve lied smoothly. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tony’s mouth, which had opened to step in with some bullshit, snap shut. “Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner figure it’s high time we investigated how we could upgrade medical care for active duty soldiers on home soil, so they asked that Sam and I accompany them to some bases to give some insight as former military members ourselves about what we find out.”

“Upgrades!” the Major exclaimed, looking pleased. “These would be donations from Stark Industries? I haven’t heard anything from the suits in Washington about any of this.”

“That’s right,” Tony said easily. “Anything we can do for our men and women in uniform.”

Steve fell to the back of the group as they followed the Major out of the visitor’s building and across the grounds of the base toward a cluster of buildings a hundred yards or so away. He pulled out his phone and texted Tony, knowing the other man’s glasses would display the text right away. _Project Icarus,_ he sent. _Don’t raise suspicion yet. I'll try to peel off from the group._

Inside the medical facilities, the Major began a tour, explaining to Bruce and Tony all the things he felt needed attention. They played their part admirably, Bruce asking questions about medical stuff and Tony about logistics and business, keeping the Major occupied. Steve trailed behind, grabbing Sam’s arm. When they were far enough behind to not be overheard, but still looked to be following along, Steve whispered, “Gomez, the woman out front? Told me about something called Project Icarus. Keep your eyes open.”

Sam nodded.

It wasn’t much later that Sam shot his hand out, stopping Steve. When he turned to look, Steve understood why. On the door to a room that the Major had skipped over on the tour, there was a clipboard hanging. Behind an inconspicuous cover page, which was just slightly off-center, Steve could see a logo stamped in the bottom corner of the second page. Wings flanking the letter I. 

He looked around, satisfied that Tony had the Major distracted, and tried the door. Locked. He squeezed the door handle until it crumpled in his hand, then slipped through the door.

Inside, a group of soldiers in hospital gowns were playing cards at a table. They were on their feet in an instant, alarmed by the intrusion of an unknown figure.

“Holy shit,” someone said. “It’s Captain America!”

Immediately the mannerisms in the room changed. Everyone started to flood over to him, reaching out hands to shake and introducing themselves. “You’re our inspiration, man!” someone said.

“Inspiration for what?” Steve asked, trying to look over their heads and see into the room. There were lines of beds stretching out, but only one was full. Everyone else seemed to be up and moving.

“Icarus!” one of the soldiers said. “That’s why you’re here, right?”

“Of course,” Steve said quickly. “Icarus. How’s… how’s it going?”

Now the mood shifted. Some of the soldiers exchanged dark glances.

Steve tried a new tack. “Is one of you Paula? Paula Romano?”

“That’s me,” a surprised voice chimed from the back of the group.

“Your-- friend… um, I never caught her first name, sorry. Gomez?” he said, wondering if it was public knowledge that the two were together. Better to keep that to himself just in case.

“Cristi!” Paula exclaimed. “Is she okay?”

“Yes. I mean, I think so. She asked me to check in on you.” 

“Oh,” Paula said, looking both pleased and sad. “If you see her on your way out, tell her the doctors won’t let us out of the test wing yet. We’re under constant surveillance right now.”

“Why?” Steve asked.

A few people glanced at the bed that was not empty, so Steve moved past the crowd and made his way there. A young man sat on the bed, staring at nothing. 

A shiver ran down Steve’s spine. Lost time. “How long?” he asked.

“This time? Two hours and counting,” someone answered quietly.

“Is that typical?”

“Not for most of us,” someone else said. “But whenever it starts getting longer like this… sometimes we don’t come back. Four hours is about the longest anyone has gone and still made it through.”

Steve froze. “What do you mean?”

“The doc said something about unexpected ongoing DNA changes,” the first person said. “I guess the serum makes our DNA change when it’s first injected, which was expected, but then sometimes it keeps changing. The blanking—they think it’s when something is rewriting.”

Steve was vibrating with adrenaline. Serum. Icarus was another super soldier program. _”You’re our inspiration, man!”_ He shuddered.

“And?” he prompted, still not looking at the others. His gaze was fixed on the man—boy, really— in front of him.

“And sometimes… we don’t come back,” Paula said quietly. 

“How many have you lost this way?” Steve asked, trying to keep his voice neutral but failing miserably. He heard a few people take steps back.

“Four,” Paula said after a pause. “But there was an earlier, smaller group of Icarus soldiers who actually shipped out to Iraq and Afghanistan. Not sure how many of them are still around, but of the ones we know are dead, we also don't know how many were because of this and how many...” she trailed off, leaving the obvious unspoken.

“I see.”

He turned and started for the door, the Icarus soldiers falling back and making way in silence as they took in his stiff posture and enraged expression.

“We’re sorry,” someone called as he put his hand on the door. “We didn’t want to fail you.”

“Fail… me?” Steve asked, turning back to the group. They were all looking away, shifting nervously. 

“We can’t handle the serum like you did,” someone said from the back of the group. “We just wanted to do our best for our country, but….”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know what was different about the serum when I was injected, but odds are good that what you got isn’t identical to what Erskine gave me. But… you haven’t failed me. I’m going to get you help.” _Us,_ he corrected himself mentally. _I need to get **us** help_.

He opened the door, stepped into the hallway, and was about to find his friends when the door flew open behind him and Paula was there, grabbing his arm to stop him. “Wait, Cap!”

He turned back to her, looking up and down the hall to make sure nobody saw. Sam was there, leaning casually against the wall, eyes on his phone screen. Looking out. “Sergeant James Barnes,” she said. “Honorable discharge, I think he moved to Brooklyn. He was in the first Icarus batch. He might… he might know something.”

Steve stared at her, committing the name to memory. “Thank you, Paula,” he said, covering her hand with his. “Hang in there.”

She nodded, and slipped back into the room. 

Sam turned to Steve, eyes searching. “Well?”

“Not here,” Steve gritted out. “Let’s find Tony and the others before anyone suspects.”

Sam nodded, but his eyes cut to the crumpled door knob. “They’re going to know soon enough.”

It was true—Steve hadn’t exactly asked the Icarus soldiers to keep quiet about his visit, nor could he do so without compromising them. Someone would notice the door handle, and one of the Icarus soldiers would come clean to their CO about Steve's visit, because it was the military, and lying to your CO was frowned upon. Asking them to do so… it would have put them in the position of either disappointing their hero (a role he hated more and more) or risking their good standing with the army.

“We better go,” Steve said. 

They found Tony, Bruce, and the Major around the next corner. 

“Sorry,” Steve said, as they rejoined the group. “Nurses asked for autographs,” he provided as a quick explanation. “Tony, Bruce, have you seen enough? I just remembered I promised… Natasha… we’d meet her for lunch.”

“Great, I didn’t know she’d be in town!” Tony exclaimed, turning to shake the Major’s hand. “I think we’ve seen what we need. I’ll be in touch, Major.”

The Major escorted them back to the front, where they surrendered their badges to PFC Gomez. As she took each one, she used a sharpie to mark through the visitor bar code, then tore off the bottom half with the dates and Fort Sam insignia. As he handed over his badge, Steve took a second to murmur, “Paula says hi.”

Gomez’s eyes widened, then she nodded and took his badge. She used marked and tore it like she had all the others, but Steve watched as she quickly scrawled something else onto it. Once it had been marked as inactive, she held out all of the badges. “Souvenirs?” she asked, smiling.

Steve was the only one who took his, slipping it into his pocket to be inspected later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this, a name drop of the man whose presence you've been waiting for in the story? 
> 
> Any semblance of realistic army stuff is a sham, because I'm basing it all on mediocre research after some quick googling. Except the whole army/air force rivalry thing. That's 100% true. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! If you're enjoying, please take a second and leave kudos and/or a comment! It really helps, especially because I don't really promote my own work anywhere--you leaving kudos helps other readers decide to try the story out! 
> 
> And of course every comment you leave feeds my soul and restores me a little from the desiccated husk, mockery-of-life existence that I lead.
> 
> JK it's not that bad, but I do love comments.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the poor quality of my fake military knowledge is rivaled only by the absurdity of the psuedo-science of this story. Look, we accept so much bullshit pseudo-science from Marvel all the time, please just let me live in a world where we all just accept the nonsense in this story, too.

There was less fallout than Steve had expected from the Major discovering that he had barged his way into Project Icarus’s “test wing.” Not technically part of the army, but also a figure of legend whose public censoring would be very damaging for them, they didn’t quite know how to go about responding. He was called into a General’s office in Washington and chided, then debriefed with official, incomplete information about Icarus. He made his stance on the project clear, declining the offer to become an official consultant, and left.

(Tony's generous donation of new medical equipment to Fort Sam and several other domestic bases certainly helped smooth the matter over.)

Meanwhile, Tony and Bruce had managed to get their hands on a lot more information. While Steve and Sam had been busy with the soldiers of Icarus, Tony had planted a tiny bot that had installed a virus into the base’s computer system that allowed remote access. So far, it seemed to be working without detection, so Tony had quickly copied over major files in case they lost access.

This confirmed Steve’s suspicion that what he had learned from the General had been incomplete, even misleading. The doctors’ reports on the Icarus soldiers were bleaker than the picture the General had painted of pioneering a new, safe test system for the super soldier serum.

A few days after their escapades at Fort Sam, Steve lost time again. Forty-seven minutes. Radically reduced from the previous episode, but still much longer and with less time in between than usual. With what they had learned on the visit to the Icarus test wing about how the symptoms escalated before death, this was especially distressing. Bruce took more DNA tests, but spread his hands helplessly when Steve asked how soon they could find a difference in his DNA sequences.

“It’s not that simple, Steve,” Bruce sighed. “It takes a long time to map these things out, and even if we are able to find a discrepancy between this data and the previous sample, we might not have any idea what it means.”

“On TV shows, they just put it into a computer,” Steve muttered.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Why do you watch so much crime drama? They make all that stuff up.”

Still, the forty-seven minute episode had Steve itching for faster results, so he set his sights to a new avenue of investigation. Sergeant James Barnes.

Tony found him quickly enough. The man had indeed been honorably discharged just a few months ago after losing an arm in Iraq. 

“Why was he in Iraq if he was Icarus?” Tony asked, flicking through some newspaper reports about the sergeant. “Weren’t all the other guinea pigs still in the lab?”

Steve winced at Tony’s casual reference to the Icarus soldiers, and by association, him, as guinea pigs. “There was an earlier group who shipped out,” he said, studying the photographs of Sergeant Barnes that Tony had digitally spread across the room. "Barnes is the only one we know about for now."

He had a handsome face, his hair cropped military short, blue eyes staring straight at the camera with a serious expression. 

“Address sent to your phone,” Tony said. 

“You’re not coming?” Steve asked, surprised.

“Pepper needs me for some clean energy stuff, there's a conference in town. You know how it is.”

Steve didn’t, but he didn’t ask.

* * *

Steve parked his motorcycle outside the address Tony had found and sat there for a minute, staring up at the building with an unfamiliar nervousness digging at his insides. It felt somehow more intrusive to walk up to this man’s door and knock than it had to bust his way into a locked room on an army base.

He took a deep breath, dismounted from his bike, and turned to secure the kickstand. When he stood up and turned around, he collided squarely with another person.

A dog leash tangled them up as Steve tried to regain his balance from the surprise collision, and a big gray dog barked and ran around excitedly. The man holding the leash staggered under the strong dog’s excitement, muttering expletives and apologies as he and Steve both danced and stumbled around, trying to steady each other and themselves and not trip on the leash.

After a sequence that could have been in a Three Stooges sketch (Steve had seen them live back in ‘36, learned that after the war they had appeared extensively on television), both men and the dog had firmly planted their feet on the ground again.

“Sorry,” Steve and the other man said at the same time. The dog bumped up into Steve’s knees, grinning happily at him.

Steve knelt and started to scratch the dog’s ears. “Hello there,” he said as the dog excitedly wagged its tail at the attention. “Aren’t you precious.”

“This is Edward,” the man said. Steve looked up in surprise, unused to such a human name being applied to a dog, and felt his surprise deepen as he (finally) recognized the man.

“Sergeant Barnes?” he said, standing quickly (to Edward’s dismay).

Barnes’s face turned suspicious. “Who’s asking?” A second later, recognition began to bloom. “Wait… are you…?”

“Steve Rogers,” Steve said, grimacing a bit as he held out a hand. Barnes took it after a second’s hesitation. “I was actually here to see you.”

“Really?” Barnes asked, looking a bit bitter. “Is this army official business?”

“No,” Steve answered, feeling his heart sink. Barnes did not seem excited and the prospect of talking to him. “It’s… it’s personal.”

“Personal?” Barnes snorted, tugging Edward’s leash gently to bring the pup back to his side. He started up the steps to his building’s gate. It occurred to Steve as he watched him climb the steps that Barnes must have been out for a run. His shirt was sweaty and plastered to his chest and back. “What personal business could Captain America have with me?”

“Well, personal may not be the best term,” Steve said, waiting at the bottom of the stairs for an invitation. “It’s not official business, but it relates to some… shared experience from army days.”

Barnes turned to eye him, frowning. “Shared experience that I’m absolutely not supposed to talk about?”

“You really think I don’t have the security clearance for it?” Steve asked with a cocky smile, tipping his head to the side. He had absolutely no idea what his security clearance was these days. 

The corners of Barnes’s mouth twitched upward, making Steve suspect he was savvy to the misdirection. “Alright, come on up. I wasn’t expecting company so I will accept no criticism about the state of my apartment.”

Steve chuckled. “I wouldn’t dream of criticizing.”

They made their way up the stairs, Edward charging ahead. Barnes just dropped the leash rather than contend one-armed with the pulling pup on the stairs. “Sorry, he’s still a puppy. I know he’s big, but he’s only just a year old.”

“Pit bull?” Steve asked.

“Yep,” Barnes confirmed. “Best dogs ever, if you ask me.”

“I’m partial,” Steve admitted. “They just have such big smiles.”

“Right?” Barnes agreed, throwing a grin over his shoulder. “And their ears!”

They arrived at the apartment door, Edward staring intently at the expanse of wood in front of his face as Barnes messed with the lock. As soon as the door began to creak open, Edward shoved his head into the gap and forced his way through, bolting inside. Steve chuckled a bit at the eye roll Barnes performed in response to this, then followed him inside.

Once the door was locked and shoes kicked off, Barnes waved Steve in down the hall. “Make yourself at home,” he said, turning into a shorter hallway off to the side of where he gestured for Steve to go. “I’m going to get cleaned up real quick.”

Steve nodded and made his way into the living room, settling uneasily on Barnes’s couch. As he heard the sink turn on in the bathroom, Edward reappeared from where he had apparently been drinking some water, as his face was absolutely drenched and dripping. He saw Steve and leapt into action, racing across the room to leap onto the couch and start licking at his face. 

“Do you get any water _in_ your mouth when you drink, Edward?” Steve asked, laughing a bit as he fended off the extremely wet and sloppy pittie kisses.

“He usually doesn’t,” Barnes confirmed with a grin as he emerged from the inner rooms, face cleaned and wearing fresh clothes. “Edward, come on, leave him alone.”

Edward, to his credit, jumped down from the couch and came to sit next to Barnes as the sergeant settled in an armchair that was arranged at a 90 degree angle from the couch.

“Alright, Captain,” Barnes said, stroking his hand down Edward’s soft gray head. “What personal-not-personal business can I help you with?”

“Icarus,” Steve said right away, hoping his read that Barnes was a down-to-business kind of person was right. “I’ve just come back from a trip to Fort Sam.”

“Oh? How’s Major Hastry?” Barnes asked, voice bitter once again.

“I didn’t talk to him much,” Steve admitted. “I left that to Tony and broke into the Icarus test wing.”

Barnes’s eyebrows shot up. “You did what?”

“It was locked, so I—” Steve mimed crushing a doorknob. Barnes grinned. “Met someone there who told me you might know some things.”

The grin faded, replaced by the same suspicion Steve had seen earlier. “What kind of things?”

Steve took a deep breath. “Do you… lose time?” he asked.

Barnes’s face was carefully blank. “What?”

The bitterness, the suspicion— Steve knew disillusionment when he saw it. He wouldn’t get through to Barnes without proving some goodwill. “Mind if I show you something?” he asked, fishing for his phone just like he had done for Sam after his nine hour episode.

Barnes nodded, guarded, and held out his hand. Once the spreadsheet had loaded, Steve took a deep breath and handed it over. This was the first person outside his inner circle of friends whom he had told about his own lost time.

“Did you steal this data from the base?” Barnes asked, eyebrows once again climbing. 

“No.”

“Someone gave it to you.”

“It’s mine.”

“Yours?” Barnes looked up, confused. “You mean—”

“I mean that is the result of me tracking my own lost time, yes.”

Barnes sat back in his chair as though winded, staring at the spreadsheet. “Is this— _nine_ hours?”

Steve nodded.

“That’s— that’s much longer than anything I’ve heard of, Captain.”

“Steve, please.”

Barnes nodded. “Alright. Steve. Call me Bucky.”

Steve arched an eyebrow. Barnes—Bucky sighed. “I know, it’s a nickname for my middle name and it just stuck and it’s weird when anyone calls me anything else unless you’re my mother or my commanding officer.”

Steve huffed a little laugh and said, “Fair enough.”

Bucky handed his phone back to him. “So you’ve been experiencing it, too. What did you call it? Losing time?”

With a nod, Steve settled his phone back in his pocket and relaxed back into the couch, mirroring Bucky’s casual posture. “That’s right. I didn’t think much of it until that nine hour period.”

Bucky looked pained. “Nine hours… that’s really long. I keep in touch with some of the kids on the base—” and now that Steve was thinking about it, Bucky looked quite a few years older than most of the Icarus soldiers, perhaps almost thirty where the others had been no more than twenty, twenty-two— “and they tell me once someone goes under for more than a few hours, it’s only a matter of—” 

Realizing, it seemed, that he was essentially giving Steve news of his imminent death, he broke off and looked away.

“Well, nine hours is longer than any period recorded that wasn’t permanent for any of the other data I’ve seen,” Steve said, relieved his voice did not shake despite his very rapidly beating heart. “And here I am. Erskine’s formula must have been different.”

Bucky nodded slowly. “The longest I’ve gone is just over an hour, and that was months ago,” he said.

Steve’s eyes flicked to Bucky’s missing limb, knowing that the injury had also been sustained just months ago. 

Bucky cracked a humorless smile. “Perceptive of you, but no. The lost time episode happened after this.”

Steve nodded.

“How long did you go after the serum injection before you started losing time?” Steve asked.

“Almost a year. They’d already deployed me, thinking I wouldn’t experience it at all, before I had my first episode.” Edward got up and disappeared into the apartment somewhere. “At first it was short enough that my men just thought I was daydreaming, except I’d be a little disoriented when I came to. It escalated over the course of about eight months, until the—” he stopped and wagged his stump at Steve. 

Edward reappeared at full speed, squeaking a ball as he tore around the corner and came to a halt in front of Bucky, chomping on the toy furiously. Bucky rolled his eyes, took the ball, and tossed it down the hall. Edward pursued, and Steve, from his angle, saw the tail end of a little pounce before the squeaking resumed and the dog returned, this time bringing the ball to Steve. 

“He likes to share,” Bucky said, his smile genuine this time. “Make sure everyone gets to play.”

“That’s sweet,” Steve said, pulling the ball gently from the pup’s mouth and tossing it down the hall.

They played with the dog for a few minutes, making small talk about Edward and dogs in general. Soon Edward lost interest in the squeaky ball when he rediscovered a bone, and he settled at Bucky’s feet, chewing with enthusiasm.

Bucky looked back up at Steve. “How long did you go before an episode?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admitted. “As far as I can tell, it only started after I came out of the ice. But if the episodes can be as short as seconds… how can I say for sure?”

“And it’s been a few years for you to progress to this point?”

“Yeah, I think the spreadsheet had the dates. I’ve been tracking them since the Battle of New York.”

Bucky whistled. Edward perked up and looked at him, then realized the whistle was not for him and returned to chewing. “That’s longer than anyone I know of from Icarus,” he said. “There were only four of us in the first batch. Two died at Fort Sam, and my buddy who shipped out with me died over there. Bullet to the heart, no flac vest because it was a surprise attack.”

“I'm sorry,” Steve said. 

Bucky shrugged, the kind of studied nonchalance that Steve had seen many veterans use when talking about their time overseas to misdirect from their pain and grief. “He was already losing so much time, I doubt he'd have survived much longer anyway. I have no idea why it affected all three of the others so much faster than me.”

“We have to find a cure,” Steve said. “We have to shut Icarus down.”

Bucky stared. “Shut it down? Is that what you want?”

Steve looked him firmly in the eye. “Good men and women are dying because of this, Bucky. We can’t let more of these… these kids get injected with this stuff when we know it’s a death sentence.”

“Hey, we don’t know that,” Bucky said. “You and me, we’re still standing.”

Steve nodded, but the nine hours of lost time weighed in his mind, heavier than any cough had ever felt in his chest all those years ago.

“But I can’t say I’m opposed to shutting this shit down. What we’ve been through… it sucks.”

Steve blinked, suddenly realizing— “You’re enhanced,” he whispered, smacking his forehead. “Oh my god, I didn’t even think.” It wasn't that it hadn't occurred to him, exactly. But the Icarus soldiers he had met on base seemed so young and, well, not exactly super strong yet. Looking at Bucky, he could see evidence of abnormally large muscles, and maybe he was just deluding himself, but he thought he could tell the man’s pulse was faster and body temperature higher, like his own.

“Well, yeah. That was the whole point.”

“No fanfare and parades and kissing babies for you lot, though,” Steve remarked, a nasty twist to his lips that could hardly be called a smile.

“No,” Bucky agreed. “The country needed you back then, so they danced you across their stages and used you for money. The _government_ needed us, this time, so they shipped us out or kept us in their labs.”

“I'm surprised they let you live here without monitoring,” Steve said, thinking about this. If the government really did have such a strong investment in Icarus, why let one of their more successful cases go?

“I tried to get out twice before,” Bucky said with a humorless smile. “They let me go this time because they couldn't imagine me being useful to them with only one arm.”

Thinking about the naivete of his younger self, so patriotic and absolutely sure that the US was different, Steve felt empty, but also like a fool. Things had changed so much for the worse.

“I’m so tired of people trying to make super soldiers,” he said, the weariness in his voice surprising himself almost as much as it did Bucky. “When will we put this much effort into peace? Into… into curing cancer, and building schools, and treating drug addiction?”

Bucky gave him a tired smile. “The more things change, the more they stay the same. You and me, pal, we're in the war business for good now, like it or not.”

“We could have been so much more,” Steve murmured, more to himself than to Bucky. He thought of his long-dormant skills at sketching and painting.

“Speak for yourself,” Bucky said, but when Steve looked up he could tell it was a joke. There was the bitterness and disillusionment printed clearly on his face again. “Well,” he continued after a moment, “what are we going to do about it?”

“We?” Steve asked.

“We. You can’t shut down a top secret military operation on your own, and I’m going nuts back in the city after all that time in the desert.”

Some small part of Steve felt suddenly jealous. He was Captain America. He was the only enhanced soldier on the superhero market. It was what made him special, gave him purpose. If he accepted Bucky’s help, then… then it would be admitting he was no better than anyone else. He would be just another super soldier in a line of super soldiers.

And apparently they were in line for death. He released his jealousy with a sigh. Whether he liked it or not, he was already in that line with the others.

Steve held out his hand. “We’ve got our work cut out.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hurray! We have an official Bucky sighting! Don't worry, he's here for good.
> 
> As always, I absolutely love your comments and kudos. Means the world to me.
> 
> For anyone wondering how writing is going, the fic is at 30k now and close to finished. I'm pretty confident it'll be done before I catch up in chapters to where I'm at, so it should be a steady one post per day update schedule until it's done. I haven't calculated how many chapters it'll be yet, though.
> 
> Carry on, loves!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A return to Fort Sam, and a revelation (or two).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gonna start doing a bit longer chapters I think, I started dividing it up and don't really want it to get into 15+ chapters. Might be a few shorter ones here and there for narrative purposes, but otherwise this is probably closer in length to what you'll be seeing from here on :)

The day after Steve recruited Bucky (or perhaps more accurately, Bucky had recruited himself), Bruce talked him through the progress he'd made with the samples and data he'd collected from Steve.

“With as much information as we have now,” Bruce finished, tapping a pen thoughtfully on the table, “I think I can move into testing some stopgap solutions. But without the formula…” he shook his head. “I don’t know if anything I can do _with_ the formula will be enough, but I know that without it, we’re taking shots in the dark.”

“What stopgaps?” Steve asked.

“The DNA and blood tests were fairly useful in helping me develop a best guess at what’s happening, and how it might be working. But for now, every solution I come up with is more likely to either fail or have diminished effect, than to work well. And while we can’t exactly reverse the process of the serum, we also need to think about what the consequences of stopping this is going to be.”

Steve leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his incoming beard. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean… we don’t know _why_ this is happening. It might be a simple side effect, in which case, great. We find a cure that target the side effect and eliminate it, and then you’re fine. But it’s also possible that this resequencing that happens is… intentional. Well, not intentional. Um… an unforeseen path that the serum is taking to fulfill its intended purpose.”

Steve cocked his head.

“Have you ever seen that video of the robot playing tic-tac-toe?” Bruce asked.

Steve walked over to where Bruce was typing something on his computer, and a moment later they watched the video together. After a few moves have been played, it was clear it would be a tied game, neither the robot nor its human opponent able to get three in a row. The robot picked up its O tile, moved the arm back and forth for a second as though confused, then placed the O directly on top of its opponent’s X tile to make a three-in-a-row.

“The need to fulfill the win condition overrode its programming to follow the rules,” Bruce said as the video looped back to the beginning. “In a way, it was programmed to do this. It was taught that the primary goal is to make three-in-a-row, so, seeing no legal move to achieve this goal, it improvised.”

“You’re saying that whatever Erskine put into me is the robot, and the lost time is when it puts the O over the X to win?”

“Basically. Or, perhaps, your body is the robot, and to keep you alive it’s, I dunno, shutting you down from time to time. We just don’t know enough yet.”

“If we get the formula, that will help?”

Bruce nodded. “It will. But it’s kept somewhere not connected to the rest of the base’s computer network, because Tony’s bug couldn’t get us access. We’ll have to get it manually.”

Steve let out a slow breath, puffing his cheeks. “I don’t suppose just asking nicely will do the trick,” he said at last.

“I already have. They figured out easily enough that we were there to see about Project Icarus, so I asked if they’d loop me in, let me help their medical team who’s already working on finding a solution. No luck.”

“They’re morons for turning you down,” Steve said. “I’ll find a way to get you that formula.”

Bruce shook his head. “Even if you do… it’s not identical to what Erskine used for you.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Steve responded with a reassuring clap on Bruce’s shoulder.

* * *

Natasha had been skeptical to let a stranger into the mission, but when Steve had explained who Bucky was, she begrudgingly relented. Sam filled out the team but would remain outside the base, their eyes and ears for any incoming trouble.

“Remind me how we’re getting in?” Bucky asked nervously as their truck approached the gates of Fort Sam, close to midnight.

“We’ve got someone on the inside,” Steve said, rolling down his window and hitting the buzzer. 

Gomez’s face filled the screen. She glanced left and right quickly, then said, “I cut the audio/video recording 30 seconds ago. You have about a minute to get in and get out of the vehicle before it restarts. I’ll meet you at the checkpoint.”

When she had offered back their badges as souvenirs on their first visit to Fort Sam, Steve had pocketed it. Later, he investigated it to find she had written a phone number. He’d taken a chance, and it turned out that Cristina Gomez was particularly interested in seeing Project Icarus shut down, on behalf of Paula Romano. Paula, Gomez reported, had been out of the test wing only once since Steve’s first visit to Fort Sam. No visitors allowed. 

Steve rather thought that an army base should not double as a prison for its own service people. He was working on applying the right pressures in Washington to see that changed.

At the checkpoint, Gomez handed them each a badge and tossed a parking permit onto their dashboard. “Try not to get caught,” she said with a nervous grin. “Or I’m the one in prison.”

Steve nodded. “We’ll be back in an hour. I’ll signal you when it’s time to cut the feeds again.”

They parted ways, Gomez back to her station, Steve, Bucky, and Natasha to where Steve guessed the Project Icarus serum and formula would be.

At the med facilities entrance, Steve and Bucky waited while Natasha punched in a code at the door. It swung open.

“How do you do that?” Bucky whispered, scanning their surroundings one more time before slipping inside and shutting the door.

She smiled that close-lipped, cold-eyed smile and wiggled a little electronic device at him. “Turns out money can buy happiness,” she drawled.

At this time of night, the med facility was mostly, but not entirely, asleep. There were night nurses and doctors, orderlies and cleaning staff still moving about the halls.

“Act like you belong here,” Steve muttered, straightening his fatigues. Bucky did the same. Natasha had opted for scrubs, although Steve had thought it risky. The night nursing staff probably all knew each other fairly well, so a newcomer would be suspicious to their ranks, whereas there were a thousand soldiers with interchangeable faces who made their ways through these halls every day.

“But soldiers who aren't sick don’t have reason to be there at night,” Nat had said, clipping a name badge that said “Natalie” onto her pink scrubs top.

Bucky knew the layout here well, having spent his early days of Icarus in these very halls. He navigated them swiftly to the back of the facility, nodding once to a doctor who rushed by and spared them a glance. Nobody else looked up from their notepads, phones, and cleaning supplies.

The lock on the door to the test wing had been replaced, but when Steve made his way to that door, Bucky stopped him. “That’s where we slept,” he said. “Not where the data will be kept.”

Steve hesitated, wishing he could check on Paula and the others, but he knew it was too risky. If they were seen by the Icarus soldiers, they were as good as seen by the Major.

“Where to, then?” he asked.

Bucky nodded down the hall, opposite the ways the Major had led them through when Steve had come with Tony, Sam, and Bruce. “Injections and tests were sometimes administered in the back,” he said. “Especially any specialized stuff we had to go through. If there’s storage and secret data, my bet’s on that.”

Steve gestured for Bucky to lead them, then fell in at his six, Natasha behind him. 

“Excuse me!” a voice called. “Stop there!”

Natasha muttered, “Keep going,” and turned to face the source of the voice.

A doctor, judging by his white coat and nametag, stood behind them. “Oh, thank goodness, Dr. Breck,” she said, reading his nametag quickly. The man frowned at her. “I’m Natalie, the new nurse on staff? I was just showing Sergeant Hill and Sergeant Price the last of the rooms for inspection.”

“Inspection?” Dr. Breck said, looking over Natasha’s shoulder at Bucky and Steve.

Bucky nodded. “Major’s orders, doctor. Routine stuff, just making sure there’s no code violations.”

“Army regulations are very strict, as you know. We got audited last month and it was a nightmare. Major Hastry just wants to avoid that happening again,” Steve supplied.

“Which is why I was looking for you,” Natasha continued, stepping forward and taking the doctor by the arm, leading him away. “I noticed that the computer station out by the C Wing was unattended, and Sergeant Price said we needed to make sure someone more senior on staff was aware of the situation right away….” She disappeared around the corner with the doctor, who was still throwing confused glances between her and Bucky and Steve.

The door was locked. “Let’s not break it if we can help it,” Bucky said as Steve tried the handle.

“I don’t have keys or Natasha’s magic,” Steve said. “Ideas?”

Bucky raised an eyebrow, then grinned and pulled a keychain out of his pocket, jingling it in front of Steve’s face. “That computer station really was unattended,” he said gleefully.

Steve couldn’t help but grin back. “Will one of these work on this door?” he asked.

“One way to find out,” Bucky answered, already trying the first key as Steve shielded him from sight of any passerbys.

Six key attempts later, and the door swung open.

“Bingo,” Bucky murmured.

Inside, they found a big, square room with computers along one wall, a medical exam table, and various storage containers set to different temperatures containing medicines, serums, petri dishes, and any other number of medical test supplies. “Any of these look like your serum?” Steve asked, gesturing at the bottles.

Bucky shook his head. “Even if I could identify it on sight, taking one would raise suspicions. Let’s just get the formula.”

The first two computers they tried were dead ends, connected to the main network and therefore already plumbed of any useful information. The third one booted up with an entirely different sequence, not wired into the local system.

“This has to be it,” Steve said over Bucky’s shoulder, leaning in with anticipation as Bucky entered a few basic commands to get the system running. 

“Password,” Bucky said as a window popped up, with this very query. “I doubt we’ll guess it. If they've gone to this length to keep this information protected, a kid's birthday isn't getting us in.”

Steve pulled a flashdrive from his pocket and delivered it into Bucky’s hand. “Here, your own little bundle of expensive happiness,” he said. “Tony made sure this wouldn’t be what stopped us from getting the information.”

Bucky plugged the flash drive in, and a moment later, the security screen had been bypassed. “Just save everything to the same drive,” Steve told him, watching Bucky drag and drop folders indiscriminately onto the memory stick.

As soon as they had everything they could get, they ducked back into the hallway, Bucky locking the door and pocketing the keys. Not five seconds later, Natasha reappeared, the doctor still in tow. Steve gave her a nod, which although it seemed a simple greeting to the doctor, he knew Natasha would understand it was confirmation that they had accomplished what they came for.

“Thanks for waiting, Sergeants,” Natasha said. “I think that finishes everything for the inspection.”

On their way out, Bucky dropped the keys to the ground next to the computer station at which he had stolen them. 

They collected their truck, and were off the base with one quick wave to Gomez as she cleared them for exit.

They made it back to the hotel. Sam was on his way to meet them at the lobby bar, and Natasha promised to join them as soon as she’d begun the data transfer to Bruce. 

Bucky appeared at the table with a bottle of champagne and four flutes.

“Bartender asked what we’re celebrating,” he said with a grin as he popped the cork out. 

“What’d you say?” Steve asked, watching Bucky pour two glasses.

They picked up their glasses and Bucky held steady eye contact for a prolonged moment before clinking his glass against Steve’s. “New beginnings,” Bucky said, winking.

Steve chuckled. “New beginnings,” he agreed, downing the champagne at the same time as Bucky. 

Bucky sat on one of the stools at the table finally, pouring them each a second glass. “Might as well be the new year already,” he said. “This is a big step.”

A spike of sadness drove itself into Steve’s stomach. A big step for Bucky, yes, and the Icarus soldiers. But the serum formula they’d uncovered wouldn’t be the one that would unlock the answers he needed for himself.

“Steve?” Bucky asked, noticing the shift in his mood.

He shook himself, trying to summon the air of celebration they’d had just a second ago. “It is. A big step, I mean. I’m hopeful we’ll get a solution for you in no time.”

“For us,” Bucky corrected, frowning. 

“That’s what I meant.”

There was a long pause while they each sipped their champagne. “Say, Steve,” Bucky said after his second glass was half empty. “After we get back, what’s going to happen?”

“Well, Bruce and Tony will be working on some kind of cure or antidote, and—”

“No, I mean… to us. Will we see each other?”

Steve gave him a confused smile. “Of course we will,” he said. “You’ll have to come to the tower for some blood tests and once Bruce has something ready, we’ll want to test it as soon as we can. And we still have to shut Icarus down.”

Bucky nodded, but he was looking at the table, smiling helplessly. “I guess I meant, when this is all over. Would you still want to… you know, spend time together?”

Steve blinked in surprise. “What like… friends?”

Bucky laughed a little, still looking at the table. He finally looked up, glancing sideways at Steve with an arched eyebrow. “Yeah, like friends.”

Something about that didn’t sit right with Steve. He wasn’t sure what it was, and it didn’t feel _bad_ , it just felt… wrong. He liked Bucky. He already thought of him as a friend. But when Bucky said “like friends,” some unknown, or perhaps just long dormant, discontent rumbled in his chest. 

God, Bucky’s eyes were really beautiful.

“I…” Steve began.

“Champagne!” Sam declared, clapping Steve on the back. Natasha appeared on Bucky’s left, popping up onto a stool and grabbing the bottle to pour two more glasses. “Someone has good taste!”

Bucky turned to the others right away, joining in the toast and general levity immediately, but Steve’s eyes lingered for a second before he, too, turned to accept the good cheer of his friends.

* * *

Steve double checked the name of the cafe one more time before stepping inside. Bucky had chosen it for their meeting, saying that the patio was dog friendly and Steve could get their coffees and meet him outside. He’d included his drink order in the text.

Bucky hadn’t arrived yet, so Steve made his way to the espresso bar and placed his order. Before the drinks were ready, he clocked Bucky and Edward arriving and claiming a table out front, though the window tint meant Bucky probably couldn’t see him. 

“Order for Steve!” the barista yelled.

Steve turned back to the bar and grabbed the two cups with a nod to the server, then used his hip to swing the door open and make his way to Bucky.

But someone had beat him to it.

“— can’t believe it, it’s been years!” a man was saying as he and Bucky exchanged a quick embrace. “Holy shit, did you get bigger?”

“Muscle mass,” Bucky laughed. 

“What happened to you?” the man said wonderingly, and one of his hands traced down the line of Bucky’s arm in a strangely intimate way.

“Joined the army,” Bucky joked. He looked up and saw Steve approaching, waved him over. “Steve!”

Edward immediately jumped up to greet Steve, who had to quickly set the drinks down or risk spilling them all over dog and humans alike. “Hey, Buck. Hi Eddie,” Steve said, kneeling to accept the enthusiastic love being offered by the pup.

“Steve, this is Derek,” Bucky said. “Derek, Steve.”

Steve stood up and clasped hands with Derek in a handshake that he immediately knew was too firm. He held the grip for a second before his better judgment caught up to him and he let go quickly, embarrassed for acting so childish. Derek seemed to be sizing him up, though thankfully there was no moment of recognition on his face.

“Nice to meet you,” Derek said, looking a little bewildered.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Steve answered. “Are you joining us?”

“Oh, uh. No, I don’t think I can. Thanks. Bucky, call me sometime. We should catch up. My number hasn’t changed.”

“Sure thing,” Bucky said.

“Well, I won’t intrude any longer,” Derek said, smiling tightly at Steve. “See you around.”

As he left, Bucky and Steve took their seats. It was a cold morning, so there weren’t many others around on the patio. “Who was that?” Steve asked.

Bucky took a sip of coffee, eyes watching Steve over the rim of the cup as if debating something. “An ex,” he said finally, setting his cup down.

Steve cocked an eyebrow. 

“From before I joined the army,” Bucky continued, cheeks a little red. From the cold? “He’s nice enough but….” he trailed off and shrugged.

Steve shrugged, too. “He seemed excited to see you.”

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed, looking decidedly unhappy. “Guess so.”

“Everything okay?” asked Steve, reaching down to pat Edward on the head.

Bucky smiled. “Yeah. Nobody has said anything about our visit to Fort Sam?” 

“Nothing yet,” Steve said, glad for the change of topic. “Seems we didn’t raise any alarm.”

“And the antidote?”

Steve tipped his head to the side in a gesture of ambivalence. “Bruce is making progress. He wanted to know if you’d give a blood sample soon.”

“Of course. Whatever he needs.”

They sipped their coffee in silence for a minute, then Steve said, “So, is it okay if I ask you about the serum?”

Bucky tilted his head. “Sure.”

“It’s just, for as long as I’ve been like… this,” Steve said, gesturing at himself, “I’ve been the only one. Or so I thought. Besides the Red Skull, of course.”

Bucky nodded.

“So I just… was it a big transformation for you?”

A shrug. “Not really. I was already pretty tall and fit, if that’s what you mean. It did bulk me up, but I probably only gained an inch or two in height. Nothing like you. I put on a lot of muscle during the process, can’t keep fat on me even if I wanted to now.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” After another sip of coffee, Steve set the cup down and leaned forward to set his elbows on the table and cradle his head in his hands. “God. I never wanted anyone else to go through that.”

“It sucked,” Bucky agreed in a sympathetic tone.

Steve nodded. “It changes things, you know? Suddenly having all this extra power. Strength. Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal if you were already big and strong, but… it’s so much weight.”

“Literally more than a hundred pounds, in your case,” Bucky said dryly. 

Steve looked up, then rolled his eyes at the smug expression on Bucky’s face. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Are you always so dramatic?”

Steve barked a laugh, dropping his head back down. “Peggy used to say that, too.”

A moment passed in silence, then Bucky sighed. “I don’t really mean it. You’re right. Of course you are. I just… I try not to think about it, usually. The world already has you. It doesn’t need me running around in tights and being all heroic, too.”

Steve’s heart clenched. “You can just opt out like that? Just, nah. No thanks.”

“I already lost my arm in exchange for taking the hero gig,” Bucky said bitterly. The silence stretched for another long moment, Steve continuing to sit with his head cradled. Finally Bucky huffed a humorless laugh and said quietly, “But… no. I can’t just sit back and do nothing. I want to help those kids who followed me into Icarus. I want to shut it down, make sure nobody else ends up like me. Like us. And if aliens invaded New York again tomorrow? You know I wouldn’t be on the sidelines.”

Silence stretched between them for a while.

Steve straightened up at last, picking up his coffee once again. He was tired of the drama, the frowns and sad feelings. They were supposed to be friends, and that meant it was good to talk about the serious stuff, but they should have some fun together, too. “Arm wrestle?” he said.

Bucky threw his head back and laughed. “You’re as bad as the rookies on base,” he accused when he could speak again. 

Steve grinned. “Come on, I gotta know. My life has either been guaranteed losing or guaranteed winning. Tony in his suit doesn’t count.” He paused, considering. “Alright, I guess Thor counts. Even if he is an alien.”

Bucky positioned himself so his elbow was on the table, holding his hand open for Steve to take it. Steve scooted his chair, careful of Edward’s paws and tail, so that he could match Bucky’s posture, then clasped hands with him. Bucky’s hand was warm despite the cold weather, just like Steve’s. Their eyes met over their interlocked hands, and Steve felt a flush of excitement at the upcoming competition. Bucky grinned, and it was more like a baring of teeth than a smile. 

“Three,” Steve said.

“Two,” Bucky joined in, and together: “One!”

Steve pushed with all his might, resisting the urge to stand up or brace himself against the table with his other hand. On the other side of the table, Bucky was straining, his face contorted as he pushed back as hard as he could. After almost forty seconds of neither man making headway, Steve finally started to feel Bucky’s strength buckling. He summoned the grit for an extra surge and managed to force Bucky’s hand to the table.

Both men laughed at the conclusion of the contest, sparking gleeful barks from Edward as he put his paws up on Bucky’s leg to check on him.

“It’s been a few months since I’ve been really dedicated to strengthening and keeping up with everything,” Bucky admitted, tussling his pup's ears. “After losing this one” (he shrugged the stump) “I’ve just been doing what I can to get by with just the other. No time for the gym when I still need to perfect tying my shoelaces again.”

“What happened?” Steve asked, knowing it was the expected question.

“Exactly what you think,” Bucky said dismissively. “The same story every other person who left with four limbs and came back with three or two will tell you.”

 _Had_ told him. Steve had done a lot of veteran outreach as Captain America, visiting recovering veterans in hospitals and at VAs. Shake hands, listen to stories, thank them for their service. Every time he had done it, he had left feeling increasingly uncertain about the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ Though his support for the veterans never wavered, his misgivings about the government and purpose they were serving in the Middle East only grew.

“Yeah,” Steve sighed. “Same story back in ‘45, too. We just have better medical teams now ...” he trailed off, an idea forming.

“What?” Bucky prompted, frowning. “You’ve got that look like you just realized something.”

“Medical teams,” Steve repeated, feeling stupid for not having made this connection earlier. “Didn’t the Wakandans just start that outreach program with all that cutting edge technology for medical research and procedures?”

Bucky scratched at his chin. “I guess? I saw that in the news last month, maybe?”

“I’ve met T’Challa,” Steve said, getting more excited. “What if their doctors could help Bruce with what’s going on with us?”

Bucky looked skeptical. “Bruce is one of the most brilliant minds in the whole world,” he pointed out. “If the Wakandans had someone as smart, wouldn’t we know about them?”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Bucky...
> 
> This is in one of those weird, quasi-canon AUs where we all just don't think too hard about the events or sequence of canon and it's fine! :) :) :) :) :)
> 
> As always, I look forward to (obsessively refreshing the browser to see) your comments and kudos!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To Wakanda!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said... just don't think about the pseudo-science very much and we'll all be happier.

Bucky had said things he regretted before, but as it turned out, his comment about the Wakandans seeming an unlikely source of help topped the list.

“Holy shit,” he whispered as Steve piloted their plane through the barrier and the Wakandan capital spread out in front of them. “How is that possible?”

Steve grinned, having been to Wakanda once before for official business following the new king’s coronation. Things had gotten out of hand with the fugitive who had murdered T’Challa’s father, and in the process of tracking him down, Steve and T’Challa had become, if not friends, mutually respected acquaintances.

At the time, Steve’s visit had been brief and focused solely on the mission. He had been astounded, just like Bucky, with the technologically advanced society that had been hiding in the heart of Africa all these years, but barely had time to acclimate before he and T’Challa were on their way to the arctic in pursuit of the fugitive.

“Right?” Steve said with a grin. “It’s still a bit of a state secret, you know. They’ve opened their borders and are sending humanitarian aid worldwide now, but they’re trying to control this particular revelation to avoid being flooded with demands for vibranium. Only people sent on official state business are allowed in.”

“Or people who personally know the king,” Bucky muttered, still staring around with wide eyes as Steve maneuvered the jet and set it down gently on the landing pad.

Steve’s grin widened. “Or that.”

They disembarked and were met with a small greeting party on the platform: T’Challa, a girl Steve thought he recognized as the king’s sister Shuri, and a few Dora Milaje warriors.

“Welcome, Steven,” T’Challa greeted him in his somewhat aloof way. He held out a hand for Steve to shake.

He took it and smiled. “Thanks for having us, your majesty.”

“You must be James Barnes,” T’Challa said, turning his attention to Bucky. 

“Why do you have no arm?” Shuri asked immediately. T’Challa threw her a Look but she ignored him and kept her gaze on Bucky.

“Lost it… in the war?” Bucky said, a little taken aback by her directness.

“Obviously,” she said, seeming a little impatient at the response. “But why has no one fitted you with a new one?”

Steve stepped in. “Our prosthetic limbs aren’t usually full arms,” he said smoothly. “Typically we can only fit veterans or other amputees with arm prostheses if they’ve lost the limb from the elbow down, not the shoulder down.”

Shuri rolled her eyes. “Can I give him an arm, brother?”

T’Challa shrugged. “If he wants one.” He smiled a little at Bucky. “Do you want one?”

“Um. Yes?”

Shuri whooped in delight. “Let’s go!”

T’Challa shook his head. “Wait, Shuri. There are many things to discuss first.”

* * *

Shuri convinced T’Challa that they could discuss all of their important business in her lab while she worked on designing Bucky’s new arm. She listened intently to the conversation about the lost time problem and asked questions as she measured his arm, took a mold of his shoulder and stump, and began using some tech that outstripped Stark’s to mock up designs.

“Why is this Dr. Banner not with you?” the Dora Milaje captain (Okoye, Steve thought) asked.

“Bruce is tied up with an energy project with Tony,” Steve explained. “But he has time to video chat with you today and tomorrow about his findings so far.”

They looked over all of the data Bruce had sent along, and Shuri called some other scientists and doctors to her lab to confer about the problems. They took some extra samples from both Steve and Bucky for Shuri and her team to run their own tests, then she shooed them out of her lab and told them to come back tomorrow.

T’Challa invited them to join him for dinner later, then asked a palace worker to see them to their lodgings. 

They had been given a suite, two bedrooms connected by a living room and kitchen. Whoever had prepared the room had left them with a map of the palace and the city in case they wanted to wander about, as well as a stocked kitchen with exotic ingredients and a few meant-to-be-cold dishes that were completely foreign to both men.

“Holy shit,” Bucky breathed as he collapsed into a chair. “I guess I’m getting a new arm?”

“Do you want a prosthesis?” Steve asked, going to the window and looking out over the marvel of a city. “You’ve never mentioned one before.”

“It’s like you said, shoulder-down arm prostheses aren’t exactly the most advanced tech in the US. Most of the time the elbow is stiff and unbendable, and the fingers only kind of work _if_ you’re lucky enough to be fitted for a fancy one like that.”

“Tony could have made something for you,” Steve pointed out. 

Bucky shrugged. “Maybe, but I didn’t really want to sit through the tests and iterations.”

“What changed?” Steve asked, looking over his shoulder to study his friend as he asked.

With a grin, Bucky gestured at the window Steve had been looking through just a second ago. “How can I say no to the princess’s offer with the evidence of this country’s technological prowess? What a gift she’s offering.”

Steve watched the way his face turned reverent at the thought of a vibranium prosthesis, and smiled. On their trip to Wakanda, just the two of them in the jet, they’d passed the time swapping stories from their wars, comparing their childhoods, and choosing songs for the other person to listen to. Steve mostly picked the jazz numbers he had grown up loving, Bucky the rock and rap hits of his early 20s. Steve found Bucky himself more interesting than the music, and now he filed away another thing he liked about him: the way he openly expressed his admiration for Shuri and his gratitude for her gift spoke volumes about his character.

He opened his mouth to reply— 

—and the next thing he knew he was blinking away an extremely bright white light, trying to focus his eyes on the faces of strangers bent over him. Immediately, panic spiked his adrenaline and he kicked out his legs to knock the person at the end of the… bed? away, then leapt to his feet and brought his hands up to a defensive position, trying to back away from his abductors and get his bearings.

But they were running from him, not trying to subdue him. Someone was yelling at him as others dragged the person he had kicked away and started attending to them, checking for broken bones and concussion.

“Steve!” finally the voice yelling for him cut through the disorientation. He recognized that voice…. He spun to see a man, Bucky, running at him.

Bucky looked like he expected a fight but Steve didn’t resist as the other man grabbed him and pulled him back, holding him with one arm across his chest from behind to keep him from going anywhere. “Steve, it’s okay. You… you lost time. We brought you to the hospital wing so the doctors could keep an eye on you, and Shuri said it would be helpful to observe you and collect data about what happened while you were out.”

Things came back quickly. “Oh, god,” he groaned, relaxing into Bucky’s hold and going a bit limp, his back pressed into Bucky’s chest, head drooping. “Did I hurt that person?”

Certain now that Steve would not kick or punch anyone else, Bucky slowly let him go, helping him sit back down before going to check on the doctor Steve had lashed out against. He came back and sat next to Steve a minute later.

“He’s going to have some nasty bruises, but you didn’t break any bones or anything,” Bucky said quietly as the other doctors ushered the injured man from the room. For a moment, they were alone. “What the fuck, man?” Bucky said after a minute.

Steve slumped forward, head cradled in his hands. “That’s never happened before,” he whispered. “But I’ve never been somewhere strange when I’ve lost time before, not like this.”

“What about the Battle of New York?” Bucky pointed out.

“Yeah, but think about it. I’m in a battle, I lose a few seconds, I come to and I’m still in a battle. Fight or flight would be exactly the right reaction there. And otherwise, I’ve mostly been at home, and nobody has ever moved me during my lost time. I space out and come to in exactly the same place, which is a familiar place that I feel safe in. This time, I was just… talking to you, and the next thing I know, I’m in a sterile test room with strangers in face masks poking at my veins.”

Bucky was quiet for a minute. “Fair enough,” he conceded. After a moment, he opened his mouth to say something else, but the door opened and T’Challa walked in before he could continue.

“T’Challa,” Steve said, getting to his feet right away. “I’m so sorry. How’s the man I hurt?”

“He’s fine, Captain,” the king reassured him. “Nothing our medical team cannot heal. He has asked me to assure you that there are no hard feelings.”

Steve let out a sigh of relief. “Is there anything I can do for him?”

T’Challa smiled. “He already has a story to tell about how Captain America was no match for him,” he said good-naturedly. “Be at ease, Steven. You are not the first warrior my doctors have treated to react badly to waking up somewhere unfamiliar.”

Bucky jumped in before Steve could belabor the point. “Thanks, your majesty. How is Shuri doing with the medicine?”

T’Challa spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “The serum you were injected with is a very strange one, James. Dr. Banner and my sister have been conferring all morning—”

“Morning,” Steve interrupted, horrified. “It’s morning?” He turned to Bucky, face pale. “How long was I out?”

Bucky looked pained, dropping his gaze before clearing his throat and answering, “Nineteen hours.”

“N— nineteen?” Steve echoed. 

“It was about three when you went out yesterday afternoon,” Bucky confirmed. “It’s about ten in the morning now.”

T’Challa nodded. “James tells us this is very unusual,” he said. “And Shuri agreed, having studied the data, that there is no precedent among the Icarus soldiers for such a long period.”

Icy tendrils wrapped themselves around Steve’s heart. “Did you think I was going to die?” he asked Bucky hoarsely. 

Bucky didn’t meet his eyes, just shrugged.

“Why is it so different for me than the other soldiers?” Steve asked, feeling some anger, no doubt born of fear and uncertainty, rising in his chest and trying not to direct it at anyone in the room.

“Perhaps I can explain,” Shuri chimed in as she entered the room. “Or at least, tell you our hypothesis.” She smiled at Steve and the others before gesturing for everyone to sit and tossing the screen she was working on so that everyone could view it. Steve returned to his seat on the bed and Bucky sat next to him, close enough that their knees touched. T’Challa took an armchair and pulled it over so that he was also facing Shuri’s make-shift presentation screen.

“Monitoring what was happening to you during the episode turned out to be very helpful,” she announced, showing them a graph that Steve did not understand. “We were able to put some trackers into your system that latched onto your genetic codes and transmitted data live. Think of it like when a doctor puts iodine into your system so that she can see how things are moving around. We constructed a dummy string of your DNA from the samples you provided, inserted it into your system, and tracked the changes happening live.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “So it is my DNA changing,” he confirmed.

“Yes,” Shuri agreed. “It seems that these episodes are the body’s way of keeping you alive through massive overhauls of faulty DNA sequences. The serum and vita-ray exposure that you underwent altered you in more ways than we had previously known, or guessed. Most likely, these effects were unintended by Dr. Erskine—an unforeseen consequence of meddling with such dangerous science.” 

She switched their view so that they now saw what Steve recognized as a DNA helix, where large chunks were slowly turning red as though infected by a virus. “I believe that the Red Skull is the result of the decay of the DNA that the preliminary serum induced. For reasons we’ll never fully know since Erskine’s original and modified formulas are lost to history, his body was not able to combat the serum’s decaying force.”

“So the serum rots our DNA,” Bucky mused, “and also gives our bodies the tools to repair the rot?”

“In simple terms? Yes,” Shuri said. “The degree of maintenance needed at any given time determines how long your episodes of lost time are, I believe. And that is also why the periods extend into longer durations in the months preceding the deaths of the other Icarus soldiers. The decay moves more rapidly, so the maintenance takes longer and occurs more frequently. Eventually, the maintenance cannot keep up with the decay and the escape hatch is pulled.”

“The escape hatch being death,” Steve said flatly.

“So far,” Shuri confirmed with a grim look. 

“Can you fix it?” T’Challa asked.

Shuri spread her hands in a gesture that mirrored the one her brother had used just moments ago. “Bruce and I have some hunches,” she said. “But the demands of these circumstances defy all rules of ethical medical testing. We have no way to know if our solutions will work outside of laboratory settings without experimenting on the very people we are trying to save.”

“What’s the problem?” Bucky said. “We already signed up for this, and if the only other option is death, I’ll take being a lab rat any day.”

“The problem is that things that work in laboratories don’t always work in the human body,” Shuri said with a frown. “Bleach is a very effective way to kill germs in the lab, but inject it into your body and it turns out to also be a very effective way to kill humans.”

A moment of silence followed this pronouncement. Steve seemed lost in thought.

“Nineteen hours is the longest recorded time any of us have gone under without dying,” Bucky said after a moment. “I don’t like Steve’s odds without help, and I know you and Bruce won’t intentionally pour bleach down his throat. We’re in uncharted territory, here, Shuri.”

She met his eyes with a serious look for a long moment, then nodded. “We’ll do everything we can,” she said, then cut her eyes to Steve and hesitated before adding, “But to be honest, we have a better shot at developing something for the Icarus soldiers first, that may or may not work as effectively for you.”

Steve nodded firmly. “Good.”

“No, not good,” Bucky protested, standing up to face Steve with an angry look on his face. “Nineteen hours, Steve! We don’t have time to focus on Icarus, you’re not—” he broke off, looked down at his feet. “What if we spend months developing something for us Icarus soldiers, and we lose you in that time?”

“Whatever we develop for the Icarus problem will likely be useful for Captain Rogers, as well,” Shuri broke in. “But there’s no guarantee it will be _as_ effective or permanent since we don’t know the full details of Erskine’s serum.”

Bucky hung his head, then gave a little, half-hearted kick at the corner of the blanket that dragged on the ground from when Steve had disrupted it earlier and walked away to look out the window.

T’Challa stood and clapped Steve on the shoulder. “We’ll know more soon, my friend. You must be hungry.”

On cue, Steve’s stomach rumbled. “And thirsty,” he admitted. T’Challa nodded and promised that he would have a meal sent up to the suite where Steve and Bucky were staying, while Shuri showed Steve how to use a kimoyo bead to help them navigate back through the palace to their rooms.

Once the room was empty except for himself and Bucky, Steve stood up and made his way to the window where Bucky still stood with his back to the room. “So,” he said, moving to stand next to his friend. “What’s going on?”

“Nineteen hours,” Bucky murmured, closing his eyes and trying to erase the pained look on his face. “After three, I thought you’d never come back. I can’t… I can’t believe you’re still here. No one else has ever….” He trailed off, leaving the thought incomplete.

“Whatever Erskine did to me, it’s clearly keeping the decay at bay differently than the Icarus formula,” Steve said.

“That’s not even what I care about, Steve!” Bucky snapped, turning away from the window and pacing into the room. “I can’t believe you’re so calm about all of this!”

“Calm?” Steve repeated, surprised. “I don’t feel calm, Bucky.”

“Well you sure seem like it! You said ‘good’ when Shuri told you she wasn’t prioritizing your treatment—”

“That is not what she said!” Steve interrupted, getting upset. “Besides, it _is_ good that she and Bruce will be able to help you more quickly! All we know right now is that this thing moves faster through Icarus soldiers than it does through me, so if she can stop it before you—”

A pause, then Bucky supplied a bitter, “Die?”

Steve grimaced, and nodded. “Then good.”

“I sat in here for nineteen hours, convinced for sixteen of them that you were just… gone. I’ve been there when it happened before, you know. I was just waiting and waiting for my buddy to come to, because he always had before, but he never did.” 

A shiver ran down Steve’s spine as he tried to imagine what that had been like for Bucky, and how awful it must have been to wait nineteen hours for relief this time.

“I’m sorry, Buck. I didn’t mean to be dismissive of it, I just... I guess I don’t know how to express my worry for myself too well, to be honest.” His stomach growled loudly, reminding him that for nineteen hours, it had not been given any filling. “Come on,” he said, making his way to the door. “Let’s get food. Nobody’s dying today.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve never thought that not caring for himself would cause anyone else distress. His solution? DISTRACT. CHANGE SUBJECT. 
> 
> Shuri Shuri she's our gal! The bleach metaphor is ripped off from Dr. Sydney McElroy, from her podcast Sawbones. She is wonderful and Sawbones is wonderful!
> 
> Thanks for all of your comments and kudos! As always, I love to hear from you.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tests are underway.

“Go fish,” Bucky said, as he and Steve sat on the hospital bed across from each other, wearing light cotton gowns and hooked up to IVs and a whole battery of monitors.

They were in the second phase of testing Shuri and Bruce’s fifth iteration of what had come to be known among the group as Sun Juice. Someone had been musing on the choice of the name Icarus, whose fate in the myth seemed to predict the fate of the soldier injected with the Icarus serum too well. Either the person who came up with the code name didn’t know the story of Icarus well, or it was one hell of a coincidence.

“Or,” Natasha had said darkly, “they had a hunch.”

Regardless, what had ultimately killed Icarus was the heat from the sun, so as it became normal for them to call the serum itself Icarus, eventually someone conceptualized the cure as the sun. When the first batch of the testable antidote came out as a liquid to be administered via IV: Sun Juice.

Steve drew a card.

“Got a seven?” Bucky asked.

Steve handed his seven of clubs over.

Bucky reached for the card with his new vibranium prosthesis, and Steve grinned to see how dextrous he was getting with it. The technology was incredible, but having lost his arm so high on the shoulder, he couldn’t rely on old muscle memory for sending signals to the joints of the prosthesis. Now two weeks into being fitted with his new limb, he was already approaching natural, fluid movements.

“Got a jack?” Bucky asked.

“Go fish,” Steve said. 

The first day of testing Sun Juice version 4, which was the first formula Shuri and Bruce were confident was viable for human testing, they had discovered an unforeseen side-effect of the anti-serum. Like having way too much caffeine, neither Steve nor Bucky could sit still or sleep on the stuff. Halfway through that first night, Bucky had shown up in Steve’s room asking if he, too, could not sleep, and then like kids at a sleepover they pushed Steve’s bed into Bucky’s room, carefully moving all of the IVs, monitors, and equipment with them, so they could stay up together. 

So far with the version 5 tests, there was no change to the insomnia side effect, so they had passed the time with: Steve teaching Bucky backgammon, Bucky teaching Steve Scattergories, too many games of Go Fish to count, one Avengers ensemble Jackbox game session, all three extended cut editions of the Lord of the Rings movies, one argument about chocolate chip cookies, extensive thumb wrestling, lots of loving on Edward (who had been moved into their now shared hospital room in the tower), and taking turns reading aloud from _The Hunger Games_.

“Oh, I drew a jack!” Bucky said with a little, gleeful grin. They’d played enough rounds of go fish by now that this was no longer as thrilling an occurrence as it had been several games ago. 

“God I wish I could sleep,” Steve said when the game ended a few minutes later. 

“You’re not tired are you, Stevie?” Bucky asked with an exhausted grin. This, they had learned, was the worst part of the tests. Still wired on the Sun Juice, but two days into the process, meant their bodies were physically exhausted despite the artificial alertness.

“At least it means we’re close to the end,” Steve said, leaning back against the headboard of the bed. Bucky was sitting at the foot of his bed still.

“Movie?” Bucky suggested. “Maybe by the time it’s over, we’ll both have drifted off peacefully.”

“Unlikely,” Steve snorted. “But yeah. We can hope.”

Bucky’s bed was currently occupied by the peacefully sleeping Edward, whose paws and nose twitched as he chased rabbits and frisbees in his dreams. Steve scooted to the edge of his bed and patted the space next to him.

“We’ve been awake, unshowered, and sharing space for two days now,” he said. “Might as well get comfortable.”

“We’re just two friends,” Bucky sang as he got up and maneuvered his IV over toward Steve.

“Two good friends,” Steve sang back, grinning as he recognized the line from the musical Wicked, which Bucky had made him listen to ad nauseum during their first series of tests.

“Two _best_ friends,” Bucky finished the lyrical build-up, and then as he climbed into bed next to Steve, they finished the phrase together: “Sharing one wonderful, oooone shoooort daaaay!”

Neither of them bothered with “The wizard will see you now!” because they were laughing too hard at Steve’s attempt to harmonize the last word, which had failed miserably. Steve wasn’t a terrible singer, but after two days without sleep, his raw throat and exhaustion certainly didn’t do his attempt any favors.

They started the movie. With as little room as there was on the bed for two large men sitting side-by-side, at about three minutes into the film Steve put his arm up and around Bucky’s shoulder to make some extra space. 

“Cuddle bros,” Bucky whispered, and they both snorted giggles.

“Snuggle pals,” Steve whispered back, and the giggles escalated.

“Just two guys gettin’ cozy,” Bucky insisted, punctuating this by turning a bit so his head was pillowed on Steve’s shoulder.

“A couple’a normal, curled up gents,” Steve concurred.

Bucky craned his head up for a second so he could see Edward, who was comfortably stretched out across an entire bed to himself. “What a spoiled brat,” he muttered. “A bed to himself, and here we are, two super-sized assholes from Brooklyn stuffed into a single twin size bed.”

Steve looked over at Edward, too, and smiled before resting his cheek on top of Bucky’s head. “Yeah, but he’s so cute.”

Bucky was quiet for a moment before sighing a little, “Yeah.” They fell silent as they finally turned their attention to the movie, now several minutes in, their heads nestled together.

By the end of the movie, they had both joined Edward in deep slumber.

* * *

Steve woke up to a text message from Cristi Gomez, the private from Fort Sam who had helped them break in undetected.

 _Paula has been out for three hours,_ it said. _Might not be coming back._

“Shit,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. Bucky, still pressed up into his side, did not wake.

“Well isn’t this a touching tableau,” Natasha drawled. She was sitting on Bucky’s bed, Edward’s head in her lap as she showered the pup with affection.

“Nat,” Steve groaned, shifting under Bucky’s weight to relieve a mild cramp in his back. “It’s Gomez.” He tossed his phone in her direction, hoping he had used the right amount of force to throw the phone to her rather than _at_ her.

She caught it easily enough and looked at the screen, reading the message. “Shit,” she agreed.

“What time did she send that?” he asked, realizing he hadn’t checked the time stamp.

“An hour ago,” Nat said, already typing back. 

“Can you get me water?” Steve requested, rubbing at his temples. “I’m hungover from the Sun Juice and I didn’t even get the benefit of being drunk.”

She got up and fetched him a glass. As she handed it over, Bucky groaned and shifted, settling even closer against Steve’s chest before sighing contentedly and falling still in his sleep once more. “Cute,” she said with a smirk.

“Whatever,” Steve grumbled, taking a sip of the water with relief.

“Gomez texted back already,” Natasha said as she looked back at Steve’s phone. “Four hours under. They let her go back into the test wing to sit with her, at least.”

“Four hours,” Steve repeated, shaking his head. “I hope she comes out of it.” He reached his hand out and, after receiving his phone back from Natasha, typed a wish for Paula’s recovery out for Gomez.

“Have you heard from Bruce or Shuri if they’re optimistic about this latest Juice?” he asked.

She gave a little one shoulder shrug. “Not enough information still,” she said. “It’ll be days before they’ve finished sorting through all the newest data from this round of tests.”

A nurse named Shivani, whom Steve and Bucky had gotten to know well over the last two weeks, entered the room with a brief knock. “Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said with a smile, giving Natasha a little nod. “Sergeant Barnes…?”

“Still out cold,” Steve said, glancing down at Bucky.

“Well, I’ll need you both awake in a minute,” Shivani said as she marked something down on Steve’s chart, then Bucky’s. “I’ll be back in five, think you can have him roused by then?”

“The man sleeps like a brick,” Steve groused, but Shivani just tittered a little laugh and gestured for Natasha to follow. Edward watched her return Steve’s phone and follow Shivani out with sad eyes.

Steve took a second to double check his phone for any update from Gomez (nothing yet), before setting it on the bedside table and turning his attention to the still-sleeping Bucky curled against his chest. Alone in the room now, he settled his arms around Bucky and held him close. He didn’t know exactly why he felt compelled to do so, but having his arms full of Bucky felt so right that he also didn’t question it.

“Buck,” he said, reaching up to move some hair out of Bucky’s face. “Bucky.”

“Hm?” Bucky said, snorting a bit as he started to come to consciousness. When he blinked his eyes open and focused up at Steve, there was a nice moment where he smiled up at him with such a gentle, pure look, and then he sighed, closed his eyes, and buried his face back into Steve’s chest and slipped back into sleep.

Steve laughed, the motion of his chest disturbing Bucky’s now light sleeping. “Bucky, you’ve gotta wake up,” Steve said, jostling him gently.

“No,” Bucky grumbled, wrapping his arms around Steve’s waist and hiding his face in his shoulder. “I won’t.”

“Shivani is coming back to take the IVs out in like, one minute,” Steve said, resting his cheek on top of Bucky’s head. “If you wake up, you can go home and shower.”

“You coming with?” Bucky mumbled into his shirt.

Steve felt a surge of anticipation shoot through his stomach and shoved Bucky gently. “Don’t tease,” he half-joked.

“I’m not a tease,” Bucky said, finally starting to sit up. Having turned as far as he had into Steve, when he pushed himself upright, their faces were brought close together and Steve thought, maybe, maybe he’d just lean in, and the moment was frozen for a second as their eyes met with no trace of the earlier laughter. 

Steve’s phone buzzed. 

Bucky finished pushing himself away as Steve relaxed his embrace to reach for the phone.

“Paula has been out for four hours,” Steve told Bucky, trying not to think about how much colder he felt without Bucky cuddled up against him. 

“What?”

Steve opened the text message from Gomez, then collapsed back against his pillow, dropping the phone against his chest.

“What? What did Cristi say?”

“Paula woke up,” Steve said, and Bucky sat down hard on his own bed, hunching over Edward to kiss his head.

“God,” Bucky sighed, relieved. “Four hours? She’s tougher than any of the other Icarus kids.”

Steve finished texting Gomez back, then turned to frown at Bucky. “You’ve been the toughest so far,” he countered. “What’s the longest you’ve lost?”

“An hour and a half,” Bucky said quietly. “Last week.”

Steve’s blood ran cold. “What?”

Bucky was carefully not looking at Steve. “I told Bruce.”

“You didn’t tell _me_.”

Shivani knocked and entered without waiting, looking at a tablet displaying some data and saying, “Alright, boys, let’s get those IVs removed and you can be on your way within the hour.”

Steve held out his arm as she approached, trying to summon a grateful smile for her as she finished all of the necessary steps for getting him needle-free. But Bucky’s hour and a half episode weighed heavily on his mind. That was the worst Bucky had ever had, and not only was it halfway to what had been fatal for most of the other Icarus soldiers, it had also happened _after_ his first treatment of Sun Juice. Was the Sun Juice not working? Had it triggered a worse response?

And why hadn’t he told him?

There was no time to ask these questions as the room became a flurry of activity, a few other nurses coming to join Shivani and do their exit procedure. This meant a lot of basic tests—temperature, reflexes, alertness, pulse, hydration level—and one more blood draw.

Finally, they were told they could leave, and together they gathered their things and Edward, and headed for the elevator to the ground floor.

Steve felt gutted, and he couldn’t say for sure why. He knew he was upset about Bucky not telling him about the lost time, but he also felt physically weaker than he had after the first batch of Sun Juice that they had tested. They had fallen asleep sooner on this stuff than on the previous iteration, but he felt like the sleep hadn’t been as deep or restful. Bucky looked tired, too; despite how well he seemed to have been sleeping earlier, he had deep, dark circles under his eyes. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Bucky said when they had finally made their way to the garage where Steve’s motorcycle was parked. 

“You’re not obligated to tell me anything,” Steve said, and it sounded hollow even to his own ears.

Bucky winced. “I know,” he said, looking at his feet. “I just… didn’t want to worry you.”

“How’d that turn out?” Steve muttered.

“Steve,” Bucky said, grabbing his arm. “Come on.”

“You witnessed nineteen hours of me laying in a bed being probed by doctors for this,” Steve snapped, jerking his arm out of Bucky’s grasp. “And you didn’t want me to worry? All I do is worry about all of this! And now I guess I worry that you won’t tell me if things get bad, too.”

“Oh, yes, and this reaction is really making me sorry,” Bucky said with a sarcastic snarl. “I’m so reassured that you’ll be understanding and not react badly when I tell you things.”

“That is _not_ fair,” Steve said through gritted teeth, “precisely because you _didn’t_ tell me!” He let out a slow breath, trying to settle himself. "Okay. Okay. I get it. I really do. I get why you wouldn't tell me. But… please. The only thing giving me hope anymore is that we're doing this together, Buck, and if you don't tell me what's happening for you, then… do we even have that?"

Bucky stared at him for a second before letting out a disbelieving laugh. "How are you even real?" he said, shaking his head. "Fine. I'm sorry. You win. I promise you'll be the first to know if anything happens."

* * *

Steve had finished his shower, inhaled a sandwich, and laid down to sleep about five minutes before his phone started buzzing. Full phone calls instead of texts usually meant official Captain America business, so he groaned and snatched the damnable device off his nightstand and answered, "Rogers," without looking.

"I promised you'd be the first to know," an extremely miserable sounding Bucky said. "Sorry if I woke you."

"Bucky? What's going on?" Steve demanded, sitting up and trying to ignore the increased pounding of his headache at the motion.

“I got home, and—” he fell silent.

“Bucky?”

A retching noise, coughing.

“It’s like I suddenly have a goddamn stomach flu,” Bucky said, slightly breathless. “Do you feel this bad?”

“No,” Steve admitted, already throwing the blankets off and grabbing some jeans and his motorcycle jacket. He didn’t feel great, if he was being honest, but it seemed he wasn’t feeling as bad as Bucky. “I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

“You don’t have to—”

“But I am. Call Bruce if something gets worse before I get there, okay?”

“Okay.”

Trying not to think about his own aches and grogginess, he gathered everything he’d need to stay overnight at Bucky’s, locked up his apartment, and made the drive. 

The door opened for him with Edward dancing happily around their feet as usual, but Bucky did not look _as usual_. He was pale and had a sheen of fevered sweat on his forehead, the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced than they had been when they’d left the hospital.

“What the hell?” Steve asked, stepping into the apartment and bringing his hand up to gently hold Bucky’s face still as he got a good look. “You look awful.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said, managing to crack a little smile. “I feel worse.”

“We should call Bruce,” Steve said. “This can’t be normal.”

Bucky sighed, grabbed Steve’s hand from where it lingered on his face, and tugged him down the hall into the apartment. “We’ll call Bruce if it gets worse,” he promised. “How do we know this isn’t a necessary side effect?”

“Exactly. We _don’t know_ , which is why we should _ask_ the person who _would know_.”

“Alright, sassy-pants. We’ll ask Bruce.”

An hour later, Bucky had been thoroughly examined. “Well,” Bruce said with a sigh, “it’s not fatal. It’s basically just… withdrawal.”

“Withdrawal,” Bucky and Steve repeated at the same time, glancing at each other to acknowledge the coincidence.

“Yes. I’m sorry, James.”

“But why him and not me?” Steve asked. “I mean, I feel a little hungover, maybe, but nothing like this.”

Bruce rubbed at the spot between his eyes. “It must be the difference in the formula of the serums,” he said, eyes squeezed shut as if fending off his own headache. “With the way we’re doing this, there’s no way to predict when you’ll react the same and when you’ll react differently. At least nothing from Shuri’s dummy DNA in either of your systems is indicating any kind of failure or worrisome changes. It’s nothing too serious, it’s just going to be a little bit miserable.”

“Thanks, Bruce,” Bucky said. “I’m glad I’m not dying.”

There was a long pause in which all three men tried not to think about the fact that both Bucky and Steve were, in fact, dying. Bruce gave a tight smile and excused himself.

“Now what?” Steve asked when they were alone again.

“Now I think I’ll sleep for days,” Bucky groaned, wincing at some pain Steve could not share.

“I wouldn’t mind doing that, myself,” Steve agreed, doing an admirable job at keeping the pity out of his voice.

There was a long pause as neither of them moved, then Bucky looked up at Steve and he seemed so small and scared. It nearly broke Steve’s heart.

“Don’t leave,” Bucky whispered.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Steve said firmly. “I’ll sleep right here.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “We literally shared a twin sized bed last night,” he pointed out. “I think we can manage to share my king.”

So Steve followed him into the bedroom, trying not to be too obvious as he took in all the details of this most personal space of Bucky’s that he had never before seen. The gunmetal gray blankets on the bed were disturbed from what must have been a neatly-made configuration by, Steve presumed, Bucky’s earlier attempt to sleep before he had called Steve. A closet door was ajar on the far side of the room, revealing a series of shirts on hangers from the angle Steve could see. A dresser and mirror took up space against the wall behind him, and the closet door had a full-length mirror hanging across the top. On the walls were a few memorabilia from the army and above the mahogany headboard of the bed, an abstract cityscape of New York in rust reds, blacks, and grays.

Edward jumped up into the bed and settled at the foot on the side where the sheets and blankets had been disturbed earlier— Bucky’s side. Bucky was in sweats and a light t-shirt, and climbed right in bed, making Edward reposition so he could fully stretch his legs. Steve took off his jacket and laid it across the dresser, then paused for a second before saying, “Do you care if I take off my pants?”

Bucky huffed a little laugh that turned into a cough. “No,” he said finally. “Again, I think we’re past the point of that mattering after last night.”

Steve figured he had a point, since the light cotton hospital gowns had been considerably less coverage than normal clothes, but it still felt different to strip out of his jeans in Bucky’s bedroom. More intimate. Less about necessity and more about comfort.

Still, he did step out of his jeans before climbing into bed on the other side from where Bucky and Edward were already curled.

Edward got up and came over to lick at Steve’s face as he was positioning pillows. Bucky laughed at the indignant noises Steve made while fending off the puppy. “He’s surprised you’re here,” Bucky explained. “But I think he likes it.”

“Mood,” Steve said, remembering the word from having spent some time with Peter Parker at the tower the other day.

Bucky gave a loud, surprised laugh, which again turned into a coughing fit. “Who taught you that?” he managed to gasp out.

“Spider-Man,” Steve said seriously.

Bucky, unaware of Peter’s identity, rolled his eyes as his coughing subsided. “Sure,” he said, clearly disbelieving.

Edward’s greeting subsided and he settled himself at Steve’s feet, forcing Steve to move in from the edge of the bed a bit to have enough space to extend his legs. “He moves for you,” Steve grumped. “I move for him.”

“Well, to be fair, it’s more his bed than yours,” Bucky said with a sleepy grin. “Do you want me to move him?”

“No,” Steve said, looking back at the dog with a smile. “I like having him right there.”

It only took a few minutes for Bucky to fall asleep, and Steve wasn’t too far behind.

* * *

Steve awoke three hours later to Edward whining and nudging at his arm. “What?” he muttered, trying to gently move the dog away so he could go back to sleep. But then he became aware of a slight tremor in the bed, and flipped over to see Bucky shivering under his mountain of blankets.

Their eyes met. Bucky gave a helpless smile even as he shook. “H-h-hey,” he whispered. “S-s-sorry about Ed-d-dward.”

“Are you okay?” Steve asked, propping himself up on his elbow to get a better look at his blanket-bundled friend.

“Just c-c-cold,” Bucky said, unable to stop shivering.

Steve considered him for a second, then said, “I’ll be right back.”

He got out of bed, padded to the kitchen, and got himself a glass of water before rummaging around Bucky’s supplies and finding a kettle, mug, and herbal tea. Once the tea was brewing, he brought the mug back into the bedroom, and set it on Bucky’s end table before climbing back under the covers.

Bucky sat up and picked up the mug with shaking hands, taking a few sips while hunching over as if trying to conserve what body heat he could.

“It’ll p-pass soon,” he told Steve when he caught his concerned look.

“How do you know?”

Bucky took another sip and shrugged. “I don’t.”

Steve’s frown deepened. “C’mere,” he said, scooting closer to Bucky and opening his arms.

Bucky sipped his tea again before setting it down and pushing himself over into Steve’s waiting arms. Steve pulled the blankets up around them before settling against the pillows and adjusting his arms so that Bucky had maximum contact to draw heat.

“Aren’t you supposed to s-s-strip to your undies for hyp-p-pothermia?” Bucky teased.

“You’re the one still in sweats,” Steve shot back.

“I’m too cold to bother taking them off,” he agreed with a sigh. After a moment, he murmured, “Thanks, Stevie.”

“Anything,” Steve promised, knowing he sounded too sincere but unable to care. “Anything for you.”

* * *

After that day, there was a long gap before Shuri and Bruce were ready to test a new phase of the Sun Juice. In the meantime, Steve went to Fort Sam to visit the Icarus soldiers, now in official capacity as he had begun working in Washington to make sure the conditions of their treatment were humane. No more closed doors and confiscated cell phones. This work had already paid off, as it had allowed Cristi Gomez to know that Paula had lost time and visit her that last time when it had lasted for four hours.

Cristi had the day off so she met Steve at the gates and threw her arms around him. “Thank you,” she whispered, then straightened and briskly brushed a tear away. “And welcome back.”

Gomez led him back to the medical wing and through the now open door to the Icarus test wing. Now, the Icarus soldiers were neither confined to the wing nor isolated from their other friends, so the wing was alive with people visiting friends stuck in bed or playing games at the table.

Paula was hooked up to an IV and some monitors, but waved enthusiastically as Steve and Cristi entered the wing. 

“Hey, Paula,” Steve greeted her with a gentle one-armed hug. “Glad you’re alright.”

People began to notice Steve and word in the room spread quickly that he was Captain America. Those who hadn’t met him before introduced themselves excitedly, and people began throwing questions around about what his role with Icarus was. Steve had been briefed and knew that most of the visitors in the room did not know the full details about Project Icarus, so he kept his comments generic.

“I did want to tell you,” he said to Paula and Cristi as the hubbub died down and they had a moment of quiet to talk, “that we’re working on a solution. It’s not ready yet, but Bucky— James Barnes— and I are helping the tests. We’ve got the best and brightest in the world working on this.”

“How is Barnes?” Paula asked. She and Bucky had apparently overlapped very briefly, which was how she had known he had moved to Brooklyn after his discharge.

“Okay,” Steve said. “The treatments we’re testing… they’ve been rougher on him than me.”

There was a shocked silence at this, then Cristi said quietly, “You? Are you… are you sick, too, Cap?”

Steve realized his mistake too late, so he took a deep breath and nodded. “It’s different, a little. I’ve lost… more time than any Icarus soldier. The serum must be pretty substantially different, to affect us so differently. But yeah.”

Paula looked at Cristi, frightened. “We thought you were… I dunno, invincible.”

Steve smiled sadly. “Most people do,” he said kindly. “It’s part of the whole national hero image, I guess. But listen, we’re getting closer to something that should help you, Paula.”

“And you?” she asked hopefully.

Steve shrugged.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, progress is happening! On more fronts than one, eeeh?
> 
> Looking forward to seeing your comments on this chapter! Hang in there--2019 is almost over, friends.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mission, a friend, a drink.

“It was only two hours this time,” Steve said, surprised by how angrily Bucky was reacting to the news that Steve had lost time again earlier in the day.

“For anyone else in this position,” Bucky said, pacing restlessly, “that would be almost fatal.”

“Yeah, but it’s a big improvement from the nineteen hours last time,” Steve pointed out.

Bucky stopped, hands on hips. “Unlike any of the rest of us, you’ve bounced between much longer and shorter periods before, Steve. For me and the Icarus crew, it seems to be pretty linear. We go from short periods to longer and longer ones, until we don’t come back. You’ve gone from very short, to longer, to very long, to shorter, to long, to short…. There is no reason to think the shorter period this time is because the Sun Juice is working.”

An electronic beeping noise came from Steve’s pocket, which he recognized as a page from Shuri on the kimoyo bead that she had sent him so that they could stay in contact more easily. He pulled it out of his pocket and held it in his palm as she’d taught him, and a holographic image of the princess of Wakanda popped up in front of him.

“Hello, Steve!” she said brightly. “Oh—good, I’m glad you’re here too, Bucky. I have good news.”

They sat side-by-side on the couch and waited.

“So, Bruce and I have figured out why the last round left Bucky in such a bad state,” she said. “We believe that Sun Juice 5.0 actually will function better as an interruption of lost time than as a treatment to prevent it.”

They looked at each other, shocked. “Like an epi-pen?” Bucky clarified.

“Yes! Good analogy, sergeant. The Sun Juice 5 formula worked as intended in some ways; it did in fact slow the process of your DNA regeneration so that your body did not need to go into a full shut-down for maintenance to occur. However, this meant the decay that had already happened did not get fixed fast enough before you started feeling symptoms.”

“So what Bruce said was withdrawal was really—”

“Yes, that was the prolonged period of the Sun Juice running its course and allowing the slower maintenance of DNA. When you were getting constant drips of it, your body was keeping up better. But once the IV was removed, you felt that bad because your body couldn’t put you in stasis while doing repairs.”

“So… it’s kind of working,” Steve said, starting to feel excited.

“Kind of,” Shuri agreed. “We think this version is going to be useful as a way to bring people in stasis, out of it. It should help the decay/repair process slow down enough for people in crisis that they won’t die, though we don’t know how effective this will be long-term. It’s possible that for some Icarus soldiers with advanced enough problems, the interruption of the maintenance process could be just as dangerous as the periods of stasis.”

“Still, a few hours of feeling like you have the flu is better than never waking up,” Bucky said. “This is huge!”

“Bruce is already working on a batch to send to Fort Sam,” Shuri said with a grin. “And I’m improving the next iteration with this data in mind. We’ve isolated the most important factors for building something that will work more as a proactive cure, so we should be ready to move to testing within the next week.”

* * *

“You can’t go on a mission!” Bucky said, hands on hips.

“They need me,” Steve said helplessly, already in full uniform and hoisting the shield onto his arm. 

“What about what you need?” Bucky demanded, dragging his IV behind him as he followed Steve to the closet of the hospital room, where he had stored his go bag just in case.

“We don’t even know if this is working,” Steve said, letting some of his frustration into his tone. 

“And now we won’t, because you’re going to go put yourself in harm’s way when you should be here helping us figure this out!”

“They’ve got you for the rest of the tests,” Steve said, shouldering his bag and not looking at Bucky’s face as he started for the door.

“And we know that the data they collect from me won’t help you, Steve! Steve!”

Steeling himself, Steve turned to look at Bucky, still in his hospital gown, hand clenched around the IV, whose face was a devastating mix of anger, accusation, and helplessness. “You can’t,” Bucky said, quieter now. “This thing we’re dealing with… it’s going to kill you.”

“A lot of people are dying already because of whatever this threat is in Korea,” Steve countered. “I can’t ignore it.”

“Staying for these tests is not ignoring it,” Bucky said. “There are a lot of good Avengers already on their way to help.”

“Yeah— _my team_!” Steve said, voice rising. “I can’t send my team into danger without going myself, come on. You know what it’s like.”

Bucky’s eyes teared up. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I do.”

Steve looked away, then stepped in and pulled Bucky close, wrapping him into a hug while carefully not disturbing the IV. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’ll finish the tests as soon as I’m back, I promise.”

* * *

Steve threw up twice on the jet to Korea.

Tony had to pull him off the battlefield when he suddenly collapsed, muscles seizing, body wracked with fever. On the jet again, he passed out on his bed, shivering and in pain, wishing he’d listened to Bucky’s warnings.

* * *

Three days later the team returned to New York and Steve staggered to the hospital room where Bruce, Shivani, and the rest of the team was ready to hook him up to the slightly altered formula of Sun Juice. They stripped him out of his uniform, laid him in the bed he had abandoned days before, and started the treatment right away.

He managed to sleep for the first six hours, but when he woke up he immediately felt the same kind of chemically-induced alertness that he had come to expect from Sun Juice.

“Fuck,” he groaned. 

Dog tags jingled and a gray puppy head popped into his field of vision, grinning and slurping at his arm.

“Hey, Eddie,” Steve said, smiling and reaching over weakly to rub his ears. He looked up and around to see if Bucky was there, too, but the room was empty. “Where’s your dad?”

Edward put his paws on the bed and looked up and down the length of it, clearly assessing the best path for jumping up. Steve made a little more space and patted the bed, and the pup took the invitation without hesitation, spinning in a tight circle a couple times before laying down with his butt near Steve’s face. 

“At least put your cuter end up here,” Steve said with a little laugh, but was happy enough to scratch his fingers into the coarser hair on Edward’s back until he rolled and shifted a bit to expose his belly for tummy rubs.

It was almost an hour later that the door cracked open and Bucky made his way inside, eyes taking in the scene of Steve cuddled up with his dog, reading something on his phone. Steve looked up, his hand stilling on Edward’s chest.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

Bucky didn’t say anything, and Steve’s heart sank. 

Edward’s tail thumped into the bed as Bucky made his way across the room toward them. “I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve said, a little desperate for Bucky to say anything.

“Shut up,” Bucky mumbled, putting his arms around Steve and pulling him close. 

Steve stiffened in surprise, then wound his own arms around Bucky awkwardly, burying his face in his friend’s neck and letting out one little, relieved sob before tamping down the flood of emotions.

“I was so worried,” Bucky said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

After a moment of shuffling around, Bucky had climbed into the bed with Steve and was sitting with his arms around him, letting Steve snuggle into his chest, with Edward squashed between Steve’s legs at the foot of the bed. 

“I made you promise we’d do this together,” Steve said after a minute, “and then I left.”

“It’s okay, Steve.”

“No, it’s not.” Steve shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Forgiven and forgotten,” Bucky insisted, squeezing him a little. “Let’s get you through this round of Juice, and we’ll worry about the rest later.”

* * *

Bruce explained that when Steve interrupted the process of the Sun Juice halfway through to leave for the mission, he had triggered the same kind of effect as the now-retired SJ5.0 formula. However, he hadn’t given the treatment enough time for any of the restorative and healing effects to start taking hold, so he had essentially halted both decay and repair in their tracks, leaving his system devastated and without much recourse.

“And you know, part of the reason we keep you hooked up to this,” Bruce said, gesturing at all of the monitors and IV drips, “is because it’s a whole cocktail, not just the SJ. There’s a bunch of other stuff in there keeping you from feeling like shit during each test session.”

Natasha, Tony, and Sam all came by at different times to keep Steve company and relieve Bucky, who was not currently hooked up to a Sun Juice drip and therefore needed normal amounts of sleep. While Bucky slept overnight, Natasha sat with her feet in Steve’s lap.

“So,” she said, eyes cutting to Bucky and then back to Steve, a small smirk on her lips. “When is it gonna be Facebook official?”

Steve tried to remember what ‘Facebook official’ meant, but failed. “What?”

She shrugged, her smirk growing.

* * *

For about a month after the SJ6.0-1 debacle, Shuri and Bruce insisted on monitoring Steve and Bucky’s longitudinal responses to the latest batch instead of testing a new formula. Autumn turned to winter, and as the holidays approached, the Avengers team managed their annual winter get-together where they wore ugly sweaters (Steve secretly liked them) and got drunk.

Well, some of them got drunk.

Bucky was invited this year, of course, having spent so much time with the team at this point that nobody thought twice about it. (Bucky thought many more times than twice about it.)

Thor arrived in his usual display of rainbows and lightning, dressed in a truly heinous (delightful, Steve thought) reindeer sweater with stuffed antlers that stuck out and a puffy red nose which honked when squeezed. He won the ugly sweater contest, a considerable improvement from the last few years when he had completely misunderstood the tradition and had worn a variety of very normal sweaters, then very ugly Halloween-type tops. It seemed, perhaps, the Asgardian had finally grasped the concept.

As the evening wore on, Thor found Steve on a balcony overlooking the city. “Hello, old friend,” Steve said, smiling as Thor leaned against the railing with him. Somehow, with everything they’d been through, Steve had always felt a strong kinship with Thor. Perhaps it was the way they were both older than they seemed, or perhaps it was the shared (and oft-ridiculed) commitment to doing the right thing. Regardless, they had always carved time out at these kinds of get-togethers to spend one-on-one.

“You are pensive this year, Steve,” Thor said, eyes on the traffic moving slowly around below them. 

“Guess I am,” Steve admitted, turning to rest his backside on the railing so he could look in through the window and observe the party happening on the other side of the glass. His eyes found Bucky, settled there, watching as he and Natasha tore up the dance floor by themselves.

“Dr. Banner informed me about the tests you have been undergoing,” Thor said. “He seemed hopeful with your progress.”

“Did he?” Steve pondered. “That’s good. I guess I’m too close to the whole thing to really have a good sense of how it’s coming.”

Thor nodded. After a moment of quiet, he continued, “I also learned of a different predicament of yours from your friend James.”

Steve cocked his head. “Oh?”

“This serum injected into the two of you prevents proper celebrations,” Thor said seriously. 

“What, we can’t get drunk? That’s the problem?”

Another nod. “Yes, Steve. Battles are only glorious in their aftermath, when triumphant warriors join together to spin tales and honor their fallen comrades. Ale, wine… they may not be necessary, but they are part of the tradition, too.”

Steve shrugged. “Never cared much for drinking back before the serum,” he said. “I was too frail. It just made me feel worse most of the time. And it’s been so long now I barely remember what it’s like.”

Thor grinned. “Care to jog your memory?” he asked, procuring a bottle from the depths of his reindeer sweater.

Steve stood up straighter, frowning at the bottle. “What is it?”

“Asgardian mead,” Thor proclaimed, clearly proud. “A full bottle. Trust me, you and your James will feel the effects. Share it with your comrade sometime.”

Steve accepted the bottle, which in itself was quite lovely, and smiled at it. “Alright. Thanks, Thor.”

As the evening wore on, Steve found himself sitting next to Bucky on the couch while a game of charades was getting louder behind them. 

“Thor brought this for me,” he said, handing the bottle over to Bucky. “Says it’ll do the trick.”

Bucky admired the bottle for a minute, then handed it back. “You gonna test that theory?”

“Only if you’re testing it with me,” Steve said, raising an eyebrow.

Bucky grinned and nodded. “Not here,” he said. “Wanna sneak out with me, Rogers?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

They made their way from the tower into the city, the mead stashed in a bag slung over Bucky’s shoulder. It was late and cold, snow falling lightly, and the city was mostly asleep— at least as much as New York ever was. They didn’t really discuss where they were going, but found their way to the water, coat lapels turned up against the snow. 

They found a place to sit that was away from a lot of the traffic and noise, and settled there.

“I’m kinda nervous,” Bucky admitted with an embarrassed laugh.

“Me too,” Steve said. “I feel like a kid trying to get away with something.”

Bucky produced the mead, pulling the cork out of the bottle and taking a whiff. His eyebrows climbed. “Wow.”

Steve took the bottle and did the same, then laughed a little. “You ready?” he asked, and Bucky nodded. Steve lifted the bottle to his lips and took a drink. Just because he couldn’t get drunk didn’t mean he hadn’t drunk his fair share of liquors over the years. The burn of the mead nevertheless made him cough as he handed the bottle back to Bucky.

Bucky joined him with sputtering at the burn.

“Holy shit,” Steve gasped, then took the bottle for another swig. Bucky laughed and followed suit. 

It didn’t take long for the effects of the mead to set in. “Wow,” Bucky said, “it doesn’t take much of this stuff, does it?”

“Is this how normal people feel when they get drunk?” Steve asked, marveling at the weird floating feeling in his head and hands.

“You’ve been drunk before, right?” Bucky said, starting to giggle.

“Yes,” Steve said quickly, and maybe a little defensively. “But y’know, back when I was—” he gestured about two feet off the ground, and Bucky’s giggle escalated into a laugh.

“The— the last time you were drunk was, what, like… 1942?”

Steve started laughing, too. “Probably,” he said, reaching for the bottle and taking another sip. “It’s… oh, god, I feel like I’m melting.”

Bucky fell over on the bench, laughing too hard, as Steve slumped back and rested his head on the backrest. “You’re a giggly drunk, huh?” he said, unable to resist chuckling at the ongoing scene.

When Bucky finally had control of himself again, he said, “So what kind of drunk is Steve Rogers?”

“I used to be a sick drunk,” he said, thinking back to when he had barely been able to drink a pint of beer without ending up sick for days. “I dunno, now.”

“Well, there’s… philosopher drunks,” Bucky said, taking another sip of mead. “You seem like the type to philsoph— phisolopha— phil-o-so-phize,” he finished strong.

“Nah,” Steve said. “I don’ wanna think.”

“Okay. What about… sad drunk? Oh no, don’t be a sad drunk, I’m too happy right now.”

Steve laughed. “I’m not sad.”

“Flirty drunk?” Bucky proposed, leaning in a little. Steve sat up a bit, a big, lazy smile spreading across his face as he watched Bucky’s face swim in his somewhat blurred vision.

“Maybe,” he said, drawing the word out.

“Oh-ho!” Bucky cackled. “Captain America is a flirty drunk!”

“Shhh,” Steve said, reaching out to cover Bucky’s mouth with his hand. “People will hear.”

“Whmm ee-ull,” Bucky said under Steve’s hand.

“What?” he asked, pulling his hand away.

“What people?” Bucky repeated.

Steve looked around, but it was still an empty, cold night next to the Hudson.

“Fair enough,” he said, then leaned his whole body against Bucky’s so suddenly that Bucky had no time to brace himself and fell backwards, laughing with surprise, until Steve was essentially lying on top of him at an awkward, bent-at-the-waist angle. “Nobody’s around.”

“Steve,” Bucky laughed, shoving at him. “You’re going to smush me.”

“That’s the plan,” Steve said, and though it _hadn’t_ been the plan, it certainly was now, and he adjusted himself into a more comfortable position, intentionally doing so in a way that involved pressing on and generally smushing Bucky. 

“Ow,” Bucky said through his laughter. “You oaf, get off.”

Steve sat up, overbalancing the other way. “Okay,” he said, bringing a hand up to cover his face with a vague sense of embarrassment, “this is a little different than just being drunk, right? Like… was I just that sick as a kid, or is this different?”

“It’s different,” Bucky confirmed, sitting up and steadying himself on the bench. “It’s close, but whatever that mead is, it hits faster and stronger than alcohol.”

“Oh my god, we did alien drugs,” Steve whispered, aghast. “What if the police catch us?”

Bucky stared at him for a second before roaring with laughter. “That— that would be— so fucking funny,” he managed to wheeze out, tears in his eyes. He forced himself to his feet, then puffed out his chest and tried to make his face serious, before saying, “Excuse me, sir, but public inebriation is illegal in New York City.”

Steve grinned. “But Officer, it’s _Asgardian_ mead. There’s no laws against alien booze.”

Bucky adopted his most offended frown, tucking his hands into his waistband as if wearing a heavy utility belt. “Don’t lie to me, son, I can smell the whiskey on you.”

“Don’t call me 'son,' sir, I’m old enough to be your grandfather,” Steve shot back.

Bucky lost it, dropping the bravado of the police officer persona and tipping over into the snow on the ground, laughing. “Can you even imagine?” he gasped out.

Steve laughed, too, before standing up and putting the mead back in the bag Bucky had left on the ground next to the bench. “Come on, chuckles,” he said, holding a hand out to hoist Bucky up from the ground. “It’s cold and Edward probably needs to pee.”

Neither man was entirely steady on his feet, so they walked to Bucky’s apartment with their arms around each other’s backs, shushing each other’s giggles like drunk teenagers at an IHOP after prom.

* * *

At Tony’s New Year party, Bucky spiked their champagne with the Asgardian mead.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm soft for that good Thor and Steve as best bros content.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this one, a little stress and a little stress relief. For anyone wondering, which is likely no one, the mead hits them faster but they also come down from it faster thanks to their super fast metabolism. 
> 
> Oh and look! The chapter count is finished. It will be 12 chapters! Hurray! 
> 
> As always, looking forward to your comments and kudos!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A roller coaster, metaphorically. 
> 
> Content warning: vomit (mild, not super explicit); discussion of wartime violence and death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's late! But it's also a little longer than the others, a nice little trade-off.

“Did you want mustard?” Steve yelled from the kitchen, cocking his head to listen for the reply. They had been working all morning on strategies for convincing the right people to get on board with shutting Icarus down, finally breaking for hotdogs at lunchtime. “Bucky?” 

He set the bottle down, heading into Bucky’s living room with a smile, wondering what had distracted him too much to bother answering. At first, Steve thought he was reading something that had been set on the coffee table, but there was nothing in front of him.

“Bucky,” Steve said, his stomach clenching. Bucky was perfectly still.

This was the first time Steve had experienced the episodes from this side of the proverbial table, and he hated it immediately. He felt panic rising in his chest as he rushed to Bucky’s side, checking his pulse and moving him gently to a position where he looked less likely to fall off of the couch.

He shuddered at the blank look in Bucky’s eyes, the completely passive and blank stare. It was odd to feel some muscle resistance when he moved him, as though his body so wanted to remain perfectly still that even without conscious intention, he was trying to keep Steve from moving him. Still, it wasn’t nearly enough to actually stop Steve from leaning him back and pushing his hand down to his side. It made Steve feel like Bucky was trapped in there, conscious but unable to respond.

Steve took a deep shuddering breath. He reminded himself that Bucky had no idea what was going on; that for him, when this was over he’d just come to and wonder where his hotdog was. He’d been in that place enough to know that this wasn’t a case of being trapped awake in an unmoving body.

“Okay, Steve,” he muttered to himself, running his hands through his hair nervously. “Call Bruce.”

He followed his own command, and a little while later Bruce showed up carrying both a case of some kind and a soft-sided medical bag. He knelt next to Bucky, asking Steve to keep Edward away while he worked.

Steve watched, arms around the dog, as Bruce pushed Bucky’s sleeve up and prepped an area with some kind of alcohol rub and iodine. Then he opened the case that carried a syringe of what could have been water from its color and consistency. Sun Juice 5.5, Steve figured. The latest and best version of the SJ epi-pen.

They had tried this on one of the Icarus soldiers at Fort Sam last month, Steve knew, and it had worked. The soldier had been quite sick for the next day, but they had forced the stasis episode to end. Bruce took a quick, deep breath, then lined up the syringe and stuck it into Bucky’s arm, depressing the applicator and letting the liquid into his veins. He removed the needle, pressed some gauze into the spot where it had been.

“We’re trying a slightly altered formula, 5.7,” Bruce told Steve calmly as they waited for Bucky to respond. “It requires multiple injections over the next 24 hours, but it should help reduce the side effects this intervention formula has been causing.”

“When will he wake up?” Steve asked.

“Soon, I think. I’m sorry, Steve, it’s just a lot of guesswork for us right now.” Bruce sat back on his heels, eyes on Bucky’s still unmoving form. “But I can show you how to administer the treatment, if you want.”

Steve nodded. After another seven minutes, Bucky finally began to stir. 

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said, trying to pretend like his eyes weren’t getting a little watery.

“Wha—I already said yes to mustard,” Bucky said, blinking rapidly as he tried to figure out why he was lying back on the couch suddenly. “Bruce? When did— oh. How long?”

“Only half an hour or so, thanks to the latest intervention juice formula,” Steve said. “How do you feel?”

Bucky sat up, rubbing at his eyes. “Hungry. Sore.”

“Sore?” Bruce prompted.

“Yeah like… achy maybe is the better word. Can I have that hotdog now?”

Steve laughed but shook his head. “Actually, we’re thinking crackers and water for now. Apparently the intervention juice can pack a pretty big punch.”

Bucky groaned as Steve disappeared into the kitchen. Edward whined at his feet until he got an ear scratch.

“But,” Bruce said quickly, “Shuri and I improved it already and it might not be so bad. I’m going to show you and Steve what to do, and then I’m going back to the tower. I think we’re close to some really good breakthroughs for the next testable serum.”

“What number are we on?” Steve asked, handing a pack of saltines to Bucky who looked at them with a distasteful frown. 

“This will be 8.3,” Bruce said. 

They watched as he showed them how the series of “intervention juice” syringes were arranged in the case he had brought, how to prep Bucky’s thigh for each injection (apparently a safer injection site for low-urgency home administration), and texted them the schedule. It was a total of six more injections, spaced irregularly over the next day or so.

“If anything happens or you feel worse or you forget something, call me,” Bruce said, staring them both down with a very serious mom look.

“We will,” Steve reassured him, seeing him to the door. “We’ll be very careful.”

After the next injection, Bucky curled up and slept, though Steve regularly woke him up to make sure he wasn’t slipping into lost time in his sleep. It was strange, how the Sun Juice always kept them so awake, but this stuff seemed to be knocking Bucky out. 

After about two hours of being awoken every ten minutes or so by an anxious Steve, Bucky pulled him down onto the couch with him, wrapped his arms around him, and said sleepily, “Enough, Stevie. I’m okay. Nap with me.”

“But the next injection—”

“Set an alarm,” Bucky grumped.

By the time Bucky had received all of the injections, they were very pleased with the results. He had felt mostly fine, just a little tired, achy, and at times hungry, but nothing close to the flu-like symptoms he had experienced after the second round of tests a few months ago. 

“This is great,” Steve said enthusiastically as Bruce and Shuri looked over the data on a conference video call with him and Bucky.

“It’s promising,” Bruce agreed.

“I don’t like this antibody response,” Shuri said, pointing at something that made Bruce frown.

When it became clear that Shuri and Bruce had no interest in taking the time to explain things in layperson terms, Bucky and Steve bade them farewell and exited the call.

“Well,” Bucky said, kicking his feet up into Steve’s lap and leaning back on the couch. “Looks like we’re close to being done with this, Rogers.”

* * *

The test of SJ8.4 ran without much difference from the last in-patient trial Bucky and Steve had gone through, except this time Tony had cheekily taken the initiative to rig up a new bed for them. The doctors and nurses still had to be able to get to each of them separately, so Tony had made it so their two beds could slide together and pull apart at need, complete with docking stations for cables and tubes from the monitors and IVs. 

Steve blushed and stammered about it, insisting it wasn’t necessary, but honestly, they had spent most of their time in the same bad over the course of the last tests anyway. Not sleeping, not until the end, just… hanging out together. More space wouldn’t hurt.

It was by far the most comfortable they had been during the tests so far. Steve would almost say it was fun, except they got news that Kabiye, the Icarus soldier who had previously been revived with intervention juice (now unofficially-officially called IJ), had gone under again, and this time the IJ was not working as well, confirming Shuri’s suspicions that the antibodies she had observed in Bucky’s system were decreasing the effectiveness of the medicine.

“Each subsequent use of IJ in the same person means it is less likely to be effective,” she said, hands on hips in her holographic image above Steve’s hand. “The more we use it on someone, the less it will help them.”

“So we have to fix it from the source,” Bucky said, nodding.

“Yes, that is still the goal,” Shuri agreed. “But perhaps we can improve on the IJ, too.”

By the time the tests were over, they had good news from Fort Sam that Kabiye had recovered with a minimal side-effect period from the IJ.

Bucky stretched his back and smiled with tired excitement as he waited for Steve to be finished with his exit procedures. “I feel better than I ever have after one of these,” he said when Steve was at last released by the nurse and they were told they could go home. 

Steve smiled, not sharing the sentiment. He felt exhausted, the aching muscle pain almost penetrating into his bones this time. “That’s good,” he said. “You can drive me home.”

“Your motorcycle is here, though,” Bucky pointed out.

Steve shook his head, eyelids already drooping. “I’d be a hazard like this,” he said, yawning.

So Bucky drove him to his apartment, waiting at the curb and leaning over as Steve got out with some concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked for the millionth time. “You can come home with me and Eddie.”

“‘M fine, Buck,” Steve insisted, smiling. “I think I’ll just go pass out for a few hours. I’ll call you once I’ve rested.”

Inside the building, he held onto the rail on the stairs to help him ascend; he felt his gut twist as he realized it was the first time he’d had to do anything like that since 1943. Only two floors up, with two more to go, he had to pause on the landing as his legs turned to jelly and he slumped to the ground at a strange angle, still holding onto the railing. 

“Ugh,” he groaned, just for the sake of vocalizing his displeasure at this turn of events.

With effort, he hauled himself back upright and staggered to the elevator, riding it to the fourth floor. He managed to make it through the door to his apartment before collapsing again in the entryway, relieved to be inside, unsure if he wanted to bother getting up and making it to his bed.

The ache in his muscles made the decision for him, as the pain started to get sharper, shooting out from where his body made contact with the hard tile floor. So he made himself get up and walk to his bedroom, shedding his shoes and pants as he went, then collapsed into the unmade bed and fell asleep before he had time to consider arranging blankets.

* * *

Two hours later, he woke up and lost the contents of his stomach forcefully over the side of the bed, not even trying to make it to the bathroom in time. 

His phone was wherever his pants were, which was not in the bedroom. His legs refused to support his weight so he summoned the same grit that had gotten him to keep trying to climb the rope wall at Lehigh even through an asthma attack, and dragged himself with his arms out into the entryway of his apartment. Once he found the phone, he collapsed onto his back and dialed Bucky.

“Hey, Stevie!” Bucky said brightly. “Feeling better?”

“Help,” Steve moaned into the phone. “Bucky… help me.”

* * *

Bucky showed up before Bruce and found him still lying on his back on the floor, his pants next to him and vomit drying on his chin and shirt. Tears stung his eyes as he looked up into Bucky’s terrified face, embarrassed and miserable.

“Sorry,” he whispered hoarsely.

“So— sorry?” Bucky repeated, incredulous, as he knelt down next to Steve and gently helped him sit up, then propped him against the wall. He smoothed Steve’s hair back from his face, noticing with chagrin that his forehead was beaded with sweat. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Just hold on. Do you need water?”

Steve nodded, eyes closing as he tried to shut out everything about the world that was too much, which was all of it.

Bucky fetched him some water and helped him drink it, forcing him to take small sips instead of gulping the whole cup down at once. Then he sat down next to him and pulled him against his chest, arms wrapped around him, stroking his hair comfortingly until Bruce arrived.

Once Bruce was there, Steve began to slip in and out of consciousness. He caught snippets of rushed conversation, winced at bright lights shining in his eyes, and moaned his protest at being moved somewhere. He tried to answer the questions Bruce was asking, but as soon as he opened his mouth to respond, the content of the question slipped away and he found himself asking again and again for Bruce to repeat himself.

“Shh,” Bucky hushed him. “Just relax, Steve.”

“But Bruce asked… what did Bruce ask?”

“That was an hour ago, Stevie. Let it go.”

Steve frowned. An hour? “No, Bruce needed to know… he asked… what did he ask?”

Bucky sighed and looked over at Bruce, who was conferring rapidly with Shuri via kimoyo bead as she desperately combed through the test data for any sign of what had gone wrong. They were back at the hospital wing in the tower where Steve and Bucky had been finishing up the 8.4 tests just hours ago. This reaction was so much worse than when Bucky had felt like he had the flu months ago after the SJ5 tests.

Finally, Bruce came back over to the bed and injected something into the IV. After a few drips, the contorted look of pain and confusion on Steve’s face receded and he sighed with relief, turning his head into the pillow and immediately dozing off.

“What was that?” Bucky asked, ready to cry with his own relief now that Steve was no longer agonized.

“A countermeasure,” Bruce said unhelpfully. “It will only work for a few hours, so I’ll explain after Shuri and I figure something better out.”

“Is he okay?” Bucky demanded, not finding this response very reassuring.

Bruce shook his head. “I don’t think so, Bucky. We told you from the beginning that going straight from the lab to human testing is dangerous, doubly so for Steve when we don’t know everything in Erskine’s formula. This isn’t just withdrawal, it’s more like… poison.”

Bucky’s blood turned to ice. “But you’re going to help him,” he said, staring in shock.

“Of course we are. Shuri is on a jet as we speak, and we’re halfway there. Tony’s running models of everything we throw at him as fast as he can. I’ve got six lab assistants testing fourteen medicines. We’re not going to rest until he’s better.”

* * *

The “countermeasure” wore off a little over four hours later. Shuri arrived right after this, stopping in to give both Steve and Bucky quick hugs and words of reassurance before disappearing into the labs.

Steve wasn’t as bad off as he had been before getting more rest, at least. He was lucid and his memory seemed to be functioning just fine, to Bucky’s relief. He couldn’t eat, but at least the IV was keeping him hydrated and nourished. 

“This feels like 80% of my childhood,” he joked when Bucky asked how he was feeling. “I just wish my ma were here to sing me to sleep.”

“Well, you’ll have to make do with me,” Bucky said, forcing a brave smile.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Please don’t sing. You always sing Frozen songs.”

“Beeees will buzz,” Bucky began, dramatically waving his hand in front of his face as if gesturing to a beautiful painting. “Kids will blow dandelion fuzz!”

“No,” Steve groaned, dragging the word out as Bucky kept going. “If you have to sing Frozen,” he interrupted, a little louder, and Bucky stopped singing to listen with a grin, “at least don’t sing Olaf’s song.”

Bucky considered, then took a deep breath. “All my life has been a series of doors in my face,” he started again. “And then suddenly I bump into you!”

Steve couldn’t help himself. “I was thinking the same thing! Cuz like, I’ve been searching my whole life to find my own place, and maybe it’s the serum talking, or the 8-4 sun juice,” he improvised.

Bucky gave him an impressed grin. “Clever thinking, Rogers,” he complimented.

Steve laughed, but it was cut short as a sharp pain dug into his side and he groaned, shifting in the bed to try to alleviate it. He closed his eyes and turned his face away from Bucky’s concerned frown as he settled back into the mattress and pillows.

“You don’t have to stay,” Steve said after a moment passed in silence. “I’m sure you have stuff you need to get done.”

“Are you kidding me?” Bucky said, voice tight. “You said we’d do this together, so we’re doing it together, pal, like it or not.”

Bucky moved the beds together at this point, letting Tony’s engineering do most of the work, then climbed up into the other one and scooted closer to Steve, so their shoulders touched. 

“Jarvis, would you please put Frozen on?” Bucky asked to the room. Steve rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest.

“Of course, sir.”

The lights dimmed a little as the TV screen against the wall lit up and moved forward, the opening notes of the Disney film playing through the speakers. Bucky sang along even to this beginning part, and Steve found himself smiling despite the pain as he settled his head on Bucky’s shoulder and listened to his mediocre Scandinavian accent. 

Halfway through “For the First Time in Forever,” Steve was asleep and Bucky quietly asked Jarvis to turn the movie off.

Natasha showed up half an hour later with Edward, the pup enthusiastically running to Bucky’s side of the bed. He didn’t jump up, though, as Bucky quickly moved his knees to block the pup’s leap. “Sorry, buddy,” he whispered, petting the dog’s head and smiling at him. “I don’t want you waking Steve up.”

Nat moved a chair over so she could sit next to Bucky, patting Edward reassuringly on his back. The hospital room had been fitted with a dog bed ages ago, though Edward rarely slept in it, so Natasha took the liberty of moving it over as well. Edward gave one last longing look at the humans’ bed, then did a few circles in his own and slumped down, eyes trained sadly on Bucky.

“How is he?” Natasha asked, eyes cutting to Steve, who was out cold on Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky sighed. “Better than when Bruce and I showed up to his apartment a few hours ago,” he said. “It was bad, Nat. He could barely put a sentence together.”

Her eyebrows flicked down in the briefest gesture of concern. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine, barely felt any side effects this time.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said flatly.

Bucky looked down. “I’m scared,” he admitted, wondering when he had come to trust Natasha this much. “Bruce said something about, this is why we don’t go from the lab to human testing, and I keep thinking about this thing Shuri said ages ago about bleach.”

At Natasha’s inquisitive look, he explained the metaphor of bleach being very effective in the lab for killing bacteria, and also very effective at killing humans. 

“You and Steve chose to do these tests knowing there were risks,” Natasha said. 

“I know. I just… it sucks, seeing him like this.”

“Can't argue with that,” she agreed. “I have faith in Bruce and Shuri, though. And faith in him,” she added, jutting her chin in Steve’s direction.

Steve slept for more than five hours, Bucky eventually shifting him onto his own pillows so he could get up, use the bathroom, and take Edward out for a walk. Natasha stayed with Steve while Bucky was gone, and when he came back, Tony was in the room, too, quietly conferring with Nat at Steve’s bedside.

Edward ran up to Tony and nuzzled his hand, causing him to jump and pull his hand back as though it had been shocked. “Warn a guy next time,” Tony scolded the pup good-naturedly, before patting his head a little awkwardly. Edward turned his attention to Natasha, a sure source of excellent pets, and was rewarded with two-handed ear rubs.

“Hi, Tony,” Bucky greeted, hanging Edward’s leash near the door.

“James,” Tony said with a nod. “New bed configuration working for you?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Bucky looked down at Edward and raised an eyebrow before reaching for his food. Edward tore away from Natasha and skidded into a sit at Bucky’s feet. Rolling his eyes, Bucky scooped out a meal for the pup, muttering, “You’re pathetic,” as he poured the food into Edward’s bowl.

Edward settled, Bucky turned back to the mini Avengers conference happening and asked, “So, what’s going on?”

“Bruce said he’d be on his way over here in the next half hour or so,” Tony said. “I came by to supervise.”

“He came by because he’s worried about Steve,” Natasha corrected. 

“Worried? I’m not worried,” Tony protested unconvincingly.

“Shut up, Tony,” Steve groaned, and they all spun to look at him. He was pushing himself up from where he had been laying, eyes squinting against the light, face contorted with pain. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Aw,” Tony said, clearly unsure what else to say or do.

Bucky moved to Steve’s side, helping him get situated against his pillows. “Hey,” he said, smiling as Steve’s blue eyes met his own. “You slept for a while. How do you feel?”

“The same,” Steve said, voice hoarse. “Thirsty.”

Natasha handed Bucky a glass of water from the end table she was next to, and he helped Steve take some sips. After craning forward for the water, he collapsed back into the pillows with a wince. “I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be weak with sickness,” he said with a pained smile.

Shuri came in at this point, hearing Steve’s comment. “Well, don’t worry, Steve,” she said with a reassuring grin. “It shouldn’t last much longer.”

“Oh, good,” Steve said, his smile turning more genuine. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thanks,” Bruce said sarcastically, following Shuri into the room.

Steve chuckled weakly. “You know what I meant,” he said, eyes on Bruce and Shuri as they approached the bed and started fiddling with the equipment. “What’s going on?”

“Turns out, critical failure is a useful diagnostic,” Bruce said as he pinched off Steve’s current IV drip and removed the bag from its hook.

“We asked, why you and not James?” Shuri said, handing Bruce a new bag to hook up. “And if something has such opposite effects on the two of you, that helps us isolate likely differences between your serums.”

“What functioned in Bucky’s system as restorative therapy for the decayed DNA seemed to aggravate it in yours,” Bruce continued, finishing with the IV calibration and unpinching the tube. 

“Hold still,” Shuri instructed Steve, holding a vibranium-gloved hand over his chest. Light poured down from the glove and a display of data projected up into the air above Steve, showing not his chest cavity or organs, but the dummy DNA sequence that Shuri had designed early on in their treatment.

Everyone looked on silently as Bruce and Shuri continued to move around the bed, murmuring to each other. From time to time, Shuri would do something to manipulate the dummy DNA, and she, Bruce, and Tony would react to whatever would happen with varying degrees of positivity or negativity. Natasha, Bucky, and Steve waited with helpless impatience.

Finally, Steve started to notice a difference in how he was feeling. “Oh, shit,” he muttered, laying back against the pillows and shutting his eyes. 

“What?” Bucky demanded, looking quickly between Steve and the others. “‘Oh shit’ what?”

“It feels weird,” Steve said, slurring his words a bit as though drunk.

“Don’t worry,” Bruce said to both Steve and Bucky. “We anticipated this. It’s going to be a little uncomfortable, Steve, but it won’t last long.”

“What’s happening?” Bucky asked.

“We did some targeted pain inhibitors so that the corrective nanoparticles could do their work without triggering seizures,” Shuri said.

“I designed those,” Tony broke in. Everyone paused to look at him, and he shrugged. “Just saying.”

“This is new, right? Nanoparticles?” Bucky asked. “Like… similar to the Iron Man suits?”

“Similar,” Tony agreed. “If you don’t understand basic biomechanical physics.”

Bucky gave him a flat stare and Nat swatted his arm.

“It’s something we’d considered pursuing all along,” Shuri said. “The dummy DNA sequences are essentially already nanoparticles, anyway. This is just a different approach to it, where we use the nanos to deliver therapeutic treatment directly to the affected sequences.”

“But that would take a long time,” Natasha protested. 

Bruce and Shuri looked at her pointedly. “Right,” she muttered. 

“It’ll be a few more minutes of this,” Shuri said, gesturing at Steve’s uncomfortable grimace. “But the inhibitors should finish kicking in after that and then he’ll start feeling better.”

“But you won’t _be_ better for a day or so,” Bruce warned Steve, “so just because you start feeling improved doesn’t mean you can move around freely or stop the treatment.”

“Got it,” Steve said, but based on his unfocused eyes and slurred speech, Bucky guessed he did not actually get it.

“Alright,” Natasha said. “Enough milling about in here. Tony, show me that new stinger you said you were developing.”

“It’s not quite finished,” Tony protested as Nat steered him toward the door.

Bruce nodded to Shuri as she started a second scan with her vibranium glove. “I’ll be in the lab.”

She nodded her acknowledgement, not looking away from the results of the scan. 

Bucky climbed into the bed on the other side of Steve, careful not to disrupt Shuri’s work, and patted the bed for Edward to jump up. The dog happily did so, making as if to go lick Steve’s face, so Bucky held him back and made him settle on the far side away from where Steve was still under examination. Edward laid his head on Bucky’s leg, staring longingly at his second favorite person.

“How’s the arm?” Shuri asked when she had finished the last of her tests. 

“Hm? Oh, it’s incredible. I barely notice it anymore,” Bucky said, flexing the metal arm so she could see. “It’s like it isn’t even a prosthesis. I seriously can’t thank you enough.”

She smiled, pleased with her work and Bucky’s gratitude. “Fixing white boys wasn’t how I envisioned spending my time after we opened our borders,” she admitted. “But I don’t mind when it’s you and Steve.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t mind. We need you on this team.”

She pressed a hand onto his shoulder reassuringly. “I know. Keep an eye on him,” she instructed, nodding to Steve, then gathered her things and left.

* * *

“This feels like shit,” Steve said. 

“Yeah?” Bucky prompted. “What’s it feel like?”

Steve frowned, trying to piece together a cohesive answer. “Like… like you’ve been crawling in the trenches for days, and it’s raining on you, too, and then you don’t have enough food.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “That sounds miserable.”

“That was all of 1944,” Steve sighed. “Did I ever tell you about the time we had to use dead soldiers as a barricade in a Hydra base to protect ourselves from a bomb Schmitt set off?”

Bucky shivered at the thought. “No,” he said. “But you don’t have to.”

Steve tried to sit up but his elbow gave out and he fell back into the pillows with a little gasp of pain. 

“Just ask for help, dummy,” Bucky grumbled, supporting Steve’s weight with his vibranium arm as he once again attempted to shift to a more upright position. With Bucky’s help, he successfully settled with his head drooping backwards against the headboard.

“Sometimes I dream about that,” Steve said, and it took Bucky a minute to remember that he was thinking about a dead body barricade and not Bucky’s hands on him. “But in my dreams, we don’t make it out and I’m stuck in a burning Hydra base with my team slowly melting around me but I don’t ever die because I just can’t seem to ever die, you know?”

“What?” Bucky said, tilting his head with a concerned frown. Steve’s eyes were shut.

“Yeah, like… all the flus and pneumonias, the doctors used to tell my ma every time I got hit that I wouldn’t make it. I always did. She didn’t, though. I couldn’t even be with her when she was dying. If I’d caught TB from her, they said I definitely would have gone, too. I wish I’d had a chance to test that theory.”

“Steve….”

Steve turned to look at Bucky, blue eyes glassy. “And then the serum should have killed me. Peggy wanted them to shut it down because I was screaming so hard when they did the vita-rays. But it didn’t. And I parachuted into Azzano through a dogfight.” He started laughing, bringing his hand that was hooked up with two tubes to cover his face. “Who does that?” he said, laughing harder. Tears started to stream down his face. 

Bucky reached over and pulled his hand away, then smoothed his hair back and said, “Hey, it’s okay, Steve.”

“No,” Steve said, sniffling. “I thought when I said we’d just ride up to Schmitt’s final base and knock on the front door, I thought… they won’t let me do that. That’s suicide. But they did. And then I crashed the plane and I thought, finally. Finally.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “But I woke up,” he whispered, voice ragged. “Why? I’m tired of dreaming about melting corpse shields.”

Bucky didn’t know what to do, so he pulled Steve close and held onto him as he cried, and texted Sam.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looking forward, as always, to your comments and kudos!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An interlude with a good friend.

Sam had been in DC, but Tony had a jet there that he was able to fly back, so he arrived about an hour and a half after Bucky texted him.

Steve was asleep again when he got there. 

“How’s he doing?” Sam asked Bucky, giving Edward belly rubs as the dog thumped his tail happily.

“It took about thirty minutes for him to stop rambling about the war and wanting to die, and then he just kinda passed out,” Bucky said, rubbing at his temples.

“Mhm. And how are you doing?”

Bucky shook his head. “I dunno.”

“Try harder than that,” Sam suggested.

Biting his lip, Bucky closed his eyes and made himself assess how he was feeling. “Not good,” he whispered finally. “I don’t like hearing him say those things. And I don’t like how much it brings up for me from my own service.”

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “I know how that is.” After a minute, Sam shifted and pulled out a book. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep, sarge,” he said. “You also just came off two days of treatment.”

“I can’t leave him,” Bucky said quietly, not looking at Sam. 

There was a long pause, then Sam said, “Alright. Just sleep here, then. I’ll take Edward out and make sure he’s okay.”

Sam was a comforting presence, and though Bucky hadn’t thought he was tired, as soon as he closed his eyes, he was out.

* * *

When Steve was awake and lucid again, Bucky finally relented and left, admitting that he was supposed to be on his way upstate to visit his sister for her birthday as of two hours ago. With Sam there to keep an eye on things, and Steve urging him to go and not be any later than he already was, he collected Edward and left.

“So,” Sam said, propping his feet up on Steve’s hospital bed and leaning back in his chair. “You wanna tell me about you and Sergeant Barnes?”

“What is there to tell?” Steve asked warily, eyes narrowing at the innocent look on Sam’s face.

“Come on, Steve. The man was curled up in your bed, refusing to leave your side, and you wanna tell me there’s nothing going on?”

Steve shifted uncomfortably, picking at the tape covering where the IV needle entered his vein. “Sam, I mean it. We’re just helping each other get through this thing. Not many people who have shared life experience.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “But when I help you get through things, we don’t cuddle up and watch Frozen.”

Steve opened his mouth to protest, but Sam pushed on. “And when I try to get you to open up about the war, you stonewall me.”

Steve’s mouth clicked shut, a confused look on his face. “The war? What are you talking about?”

Sam lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t remember telling Bucky about dead soldiers and the Hydra base?”

If Steve had had much color in his face to begin with, it would have drained. “No,” he croaked. 

“Ah, so it was just the drugs,” Sam sighed. “Here I was hoping to get to be your best man soon.”

“What did I say?” Steve asked, expression grim.

Sam recounted some of what Bucky had told him, though he suspected Bucky had not relayed everything from Steve’s half-coherent rambling. “You know, it’s been a while since we talked about the whole PTSD thing,” Sam said gently after Steve was silent for a while. 

Steve sighed. “I’ve been to a therapist a bit,” he said, picking at the blanket on his lap. “It’s been okay.”

“Yeah?” Sam asked, smiling. “That’s great, Steve.”

“But I do have those dreams a lot,” he admitted, flicking his gaze up to Sam’s and away again. “Hard to shake ‘em.”

Sam nodded. “I know what you mean. I still have nightmares about the day Riley died sometimes. Not as often as before, though.”

Steve kicked the blanket off his lap restlessly, too warm all of a sudden. “This sucks,” he complained.

“Well, what do you and James do to pass the time?” Sam asked. “I’ll up for whatever.”

Steve decided, given his earlier insistence that there was nothing going on between him and Bucky, not to divulge how often they ended up cuddled up together watching movies. Instead, he said, “Do you know how to play backgammon?”

* * *

It took another day before Steve was allowed to get up and move around, and another two days after that before Bruce and Shuri cleared him for returning to normal activity.

Sam was still in New York and staying with Steve when they learned that while they had been distracted with Steve’s near-fatal crisis, Paula and Kabiye had both lost time and been brought back with the IJ. 

“We have to get this solved before Paula loses time again,” Steve said distractedly, focused on his text message conversation with Cristi. “We know IJ loses its effectiveness over time.”

“I know Paula is important to you, but you know Kabiye is on his third revive,” Sam said, naming the Icarus soldier who seemed to have the worst reactions. 

Steve sighed. “I know. I just feel like I owe it to Cristi to solve this before Paula….”

“We’re doing everything we can, Steve,” Sam said firmly. “And Shuri says we’re closer than ever with that last round, at least for the Icarus serum.” Less confident were they in Steve’s treatment.

Steve just grunted, still focused on his conversation with Cristi.

“Come on,” Sam said after a minute, gently taking Steve’s phone from his hand and setting it aside. “Let’s go for a run.”

By the time they got back, Steve having run several extra laps around the park while Sam jokingly yelled insults at him, they were both pleasantly exhausted and feeling lighter than they had in days.

“Know what we need,” Sam said after gulping down some water.

“Showers?” Steve suggested.

“Sure, but after that, I vote we open that nice whiskey Tony gave you that you’ve never touched for me, and Thor’s mead for you, and we spend the day not thinking about Icarus or Sun Juice or anything else.”

Steve smiled. “I thought as a counselor you weren’t supposed to encourage drinking to forget your problems.”

Sam spread his arms. “That’s why I’m not _your_ counselor. Friends make bad therapists. You gonna let me into that fancy booze from Tony or what?”

“Yeah,” Steve said with a laugh. “That sounds good to me.”

* * *

Drunker than they’d been in years, Sam and Steve found themselves a few hours later laying on Steve’s floor, discarded pizza box between them, laughing hysterically at a story Sam had told about growing up with his two cousins. Apparently, they’d always been in some kind of trouble and trying to avoid getting caught by their grandmother, the family matriarch and disciplinarian.

“Oh shit,” Steve said when he could finally catch his breath, wiping tears away. “Your poor grandma.”

“Seriously, though,” Sam agreed, groping around for his water glass and craning his neck up to avoid spilling any as he drank. Before he could say anything else, he noticed a buzzing sound and checked his phone. “Not mine,” he declared. “Probably your lover boy.”

Steve looked over to see what he meant, then rolled onto his stomach to search for his phone. “We’re just friends,” he groaned as he finally did find the phone. It was, in fact, Bucky.

“Hey!” he exclaimed as he answered, trying and failing to sound normal. “How’s your sister?”

“Uh,” Bucky said. “Fine? Are you… are you drunk?”

“Sam’s here,” Steve said as if this answered the question. “Are you still upstate?”

“No, that’s why I was calling,” Bucky said, the smile in his voice evident. “Just got back in town, wanted to see if you know anything new about the Sun Juice.”

“Come over and join us!” Sam yelled, and Steve winced at how loud his voice was and smacked his shoulder lightly (“Ow!”) before starting to laugh.

“You being flirty with Sam, Cap?” Bucky asked, recalling their park bench shenanigans. 

“Nah,” Steve said. “I save that for jus’ you.”

Bucky laughed quietly. “Sure,” he said. “You guys need anything?”

“Are you coming over?” Sam yelled, and Steve once again whacked him to get him to stop yelling in his ear. (“Ow! Stop!”)

“I don’t think so,” Bucky said, laughing. “I’ve got to get Eddie settled after the road trip.”

“Aw,” Steve said, exaggerating his tone of disappointment. “See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, okay. Drink some water, Steve.”

“Yessir,” Steve said, sounding extra flirtatious even to his own ears.

Sam wolf-whistled.

Bucky laughed a little uncomfortably. “Fuck off, Rogers. I’m gonna go walk my dog.”

“Bye, Buck!”

He hung up as Sam pushed himself to his feet and staggered once before steadying himself and heading for the kitchen with their tumblers, setting them in the sink and digging out two much larger water cups. He filled them both, drained one, refilled it, and then handed the other to Steve when he came back into the living room.

“So,” he said as Steve drank his water. Steve looked over the rim of glass and Sam waggled his eyebrows. “Wanna run that by me again, about you and Bucky?”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so short. There's a couple reasons why, but one of them is that I adjusted the length of the last two chapters after planning where future chapter breaks would be, and narratively it wouldn't have made sense to change this one so I decided not to mess with it and just went ahead and wrapped up the chapter here.
> 
> We're getting close now--things move quickly through chapters 10 and 11! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A loss. A friend. A change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooof I am so sorry I didn't post this sooner. Had company over and it just never crossed my mind to get it done! Very close to the end now! <3

The day after Sam and Steve drank too much, Sam packed up and left for DC again, promising he'd be back as soon as he could. But his return came unexpectedly only a month later; SJ 9.1 tests were seven hours underway and Steve and Bucky on their ninth game of gin rummy when Sam appeared with his go bag in hand, as if he had just gotten off a plane.

“Is everything alright?” Steve asked, alarmed at his friend’s grim expression.

“Not entirely,” Sam said, dropping his bag and pulling a chair up next to the bed while they waited for Shivani to finish checking the IV drips. As the nurse left, Sam rubbed at the space between his eyes. “Bruce and Tony flew to Texas two hours ago. They didn’t have time to come by to talk to you.”

“What? Not even time for a phone call?” Bucky asked, laying his hand down so he could comfortably turn to face Sam.

“No,” Sam said. “Kabiye went under and the IJ didn’t pull him back. They're so busy trying to figure out how to help him, they barely took the time to tell Natasha to tell me to come up and keep an eye on you all. Not that I’ll be that useful, but at least I know how to safely stab you with a syringe if I have to." 

Kabiye, the Icarus soldier who had been in the middle of a lost time episode when Steve first visited Fort Sam, had been struggling the most of the Fort Sam soldiers. In the months that the New York crew had been testing Sun Juice, he had gone under more times than anyone else, and each subsequent use of the IJ had been getting less and less effective.

“He went under two hours ago?” Steve asked.

“That’s when Bruce and Tony left,” Sam clarified. “They got the news from Fort Sam and left in a hurry from Tony’s helipad..”

Bucky shifted in the bed, trying to quell his growing irritation at having to sit still. “Have you heard anything from Bruce or Tony since they left?” 

“Not yet,” Sam said, pulling his phone out and checking it again. He shook his head.

“Where’s Nat?” Bucky asked. "Why couldn't she come tell us?"

“She was with Tony when Bruce got the call, but they were working on some recon for Fury that she had to keep her eye on.”

They settled into an uncomfortable silence, nervously waiting for any news from Fort Sam. Half-hearted conversation started and stuttered out. Bucky pulled up a video on his phone and turned it off when Steve snapped at him for being loud. Sam paced, Edward at his heels, then settled, then started pacing again. Steve shifted and moved and fidgeted so much a nurse had to come tell him to stop because he was dangerously close to disrupting the needles, which were already hard enough to keep in his veins due to his accelerated healing.

“This means bad news, right?” Bucky said finally, interrupting a long stretch of quiet. “It’s been hours.”

Nobody responded.

Sam’s phone rang.

“Bruce,” Sam said, answering within the first ring. “What happened?”

“We lost him,” Bruce said, so quietly that even with heightened hearing, Bucky and Steve almost didn’t catch it. 

“Shit,” Sam said, collapsing back in his chair. Bucky grabbed Steve’s wrist, eyes wide with fear and grief.

“We did everything we could think of, but nothing we put into his system could stop the decay fast enough. We, uh. We did have some breakthroughs for improved delivery systems for the SJ that are promising. But it wasn’t enough for Kabiye.”

“How are the other Icarus soldiers?” Sam asked.

“Grieving,” Bruce said. “Scared. How are Bucky and Steve?”

“Grieving,” Steve said.

“Scared,” Bucky said.

* * *

They wore their dress uniforms to Kabiye’s funeral, which was in his hometown in Georgia. The whole Icarus crew was given permission to fly out, and Steve and Bucky joined them. They rode from the hotel to the funeral home with Paula and Cristi. 

Paula sang at the funeral. She and Cristi had their arms wrapped around each other’s waists at the cemetery, Cristi’s head on Paula’s shoulder as Paula sniffled and tried not to let her softly flowing tears turn to sobs. Steve wanted to grab Bucky’s hand and pull comfort from him, wrap him up in his arms and grant comfort to him; instead, he stood ram-rod straight and did not glance over when Bucky sniffled.

When Kabiye’s wife accepted his flag, his mother gripped her shoulder and whispered, “Have strength,” as though she had been through this before. His brother lifted his fist in the Black power salute as they lowered his casket into the earth. 

When they got into the backseat of the rental car Paula was driving, Bucky collapsed into Steve’s lap and surrendered to the grief eating him from the inside out. He hadn’t known Kabiye that well, but that’s the thing about grief. Wounds that seemed healed over yesterday were exposed to be raw today. The deaths of his entire Icarus cohort haunted him, their specters superimposed over Kabiye’s face in his handsome photograph on the casket. They stared at him, and Kabiye stared, too, and they demanded to know why he got to live when they did not.

The pale, tight faces of the other Icarus soldiers from Kabiye's cohort seemed to ask, when will it be us?

Cristi and Paula did not stare or comment when Steve stroked Bucky’s hair, whispered broken reassurances, or let his own tears flow down his cheeks.

* * *

The mood at the tower was different now. Bruce got frustrated more easily when things didn’t work out how he’d hoped. Tony was constantly trying to insert himself in the process, even when his help was neither needed nor wanted, which in turn fed Bruce’s increased irascibility. 

Kabiye’s death stuck to the walls and their clothes.

When Steve slipped into lost time nine days after the funeral, Bucky was beside himself, vibrating with terror as Bruce administered the IJ. It took two hours for him to come back, and Bruce spent the whole time assuring Bucky that the signs were all good and it was a problem of the IJ being designed for the Icarus serum that delayed his recovery. 

It took two more days for Steve to stop having what they called “aftershocks” in response to the IJ, in which he would become suddenly and violently sick. It was his first time getting the IJ, which had been designed based on the Sun Juice that had been so effective on Bucky but terrible for Steve.

“If you tell me that these side-effects give you good data, I swear to god, Bruce,” Bucky growled during a late night video call while he prepared another cup of hot water with lemon and honey for Steve, who sat shivering on his couch under a pile of blankets, Edward’s head in his lap.

“You’ve got to get some sleep,” Bruce said, clearly also exhausted.

“You first,” Bucky snapped.

“Very mature,” Natasha said, leaning into the video view. “You boys sure express care for each other so well.”

“What are you doing there?” Bucky asked, surprised.

“Just got back from Beijing,” she said, popping what looked to be a blueberry into her mouth. “Couldn’t sleep, figured I’d be a set of steady hands for Bruce.”

Bucky handed Steve the steaming mug before sitting down gently next to him and holding the phone so they were both in frame. Natasha grimaced at the pitiful look on Steve’s face, the dark circles under Bruce and Bucky’s eyes.

“We can’t stay in this place forever,” she said decisively. “I get it, Kabiye’s death was hard on all of us. But you’re killing yourselves over something that wasn’t your fault.”

“I already see a therapist,” Steve rasped out through chattering teeth. 

She sighed. “Just try to get some sleep, okay? Bucky, I’m putting you in charge of Steve’s sleep. Steve, you’re in charge of Bucky’s. I’ll be in charge of Bruce’s. Everyone go to bed.”

* * *

Thor showed up at Steve’s doorstep a few days later. Bucky was upstate for a family gathering, though this time his sister had come down early to learn how to care for him in the case of an episode while he was away from the city. She had taken it all in stride, though her wide-eyed, pale-faced stare betrayed that she was perhaps not as calm about everything as she was trying to appear.

“Steve,” Thor greeted him as he opened the door. “I heard about your fallen comrade. I am sorry.”

“Thanks, Thor. Come on in— when did you get here?” Here being Earth.

“Last night,” Thor answered, looking around curiously as he entered the apartment. “I’ve never been inside your abode before.”

“Really?” Steve asked, thinking about it for a minute. “I guess we always meet at the tower or on a mission, huh.”

“It’s nice,” Thor said, and Steve could tell he was not being entirely honest about his opinion. “Warm.”

“It’s no golden palace of Asgard,” Steve said dryly. Thor did not pick up on the sarcasm and agreed a little too enthusiastically, which made Steve laugh. And wow, did it feel good to laugh a little. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Steve said, grabbing two glasses and pouring some of the mead Thor had gifted him into them before joining him in the living room. “Things have been a little dark around here after Kabiye died.”

“It is hard to part with the people we are bound to through battle,” Thor acknowledged, taking his glass of mead and throwing it back. Steve took a much more conservative sip. “And harder still when we lose them to something like this. It makes things seem so meaningless.”

Steve swallowed past the lump in his throat. “Meaningless, and uncertain. We thought we were ahead of it.”

Thor grabbed the bottle of mead and poured himself another glass, then tipped some into Steve’s glass regardless of the amount he still hadn’t drunk of his first pour. “But your comrade’s death was not meaningless, Steve. You know this.”

“He didn’t have to die for this. None of them did. I really thought that when I went in the ice, so did the world’s dream to play god and make enhanced soldiers.”

Thor sighed as he sipped his mead slower this time. “Your comrade made a choice, just like you did. Years come and go, and wars start and end, but honorable warriors are born to all generations.”

 _Tell me, did you truly like your friend? Did you respect him?_ Peggy had asked when Steve lost one of his team in the war and hadn’t been able to pull himself out of his guilt and grief. _Well then, stop blaming yourself! Give him the dignity of making his own decisions._

Steve snorted a little laugh and looked up through his lashes at Thor. “You sound like my old friend,” he said.

“Then your friend was a very wise person,” Thor said with a firm nod. “Grief is good, Steve. But punishing yourself will not change the past, nor stem the flow of the future.”

Steve smiled sadly, took a big sip of mead, and let the burn of the drink bring warmth to fond thoughts of Peggy, Kabiye, and all of the friends he had lost in and after the war. For once, the sorrow did not swallow him whole.

* * *

A few days later, Steve was called in by Natasha to consult on a mission, though just from the tower. They didn’t need him in the field, just to give some insight into some military operations that they couldn’t make sense of.

He was surprised by how good it felt to flex his Cap muscles again; before all of this, he had just barely started to think about retiring. Now, he found himself enjoying the tactical discussions and scheming, listening to Nat and Clint murmur field codes over the comms. His heart beat faster when he could hear a fight break out, but it didn’t take long for the two spies to settle it.

As he left the tower in the afternoon, he called Bucky.

“Hey, Steve,” he said, and his voice sounded a bit strange.

“Bucky? Are you okay?”

“Uh,” Bucky said, and Steve froze in his tracks, immediately tense and ready for a fight—not with Bucky, just any fight. “I lost time this morning.”

The adrenaline in Steve’s system made the phone tremble in his hand. “What?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said quietly. “It was a couple hours, maybe.”

“A couple hours?” His blood was ice in his veins. He squeezed his eyes shut and the image of Kabiye’s wife accepting his flag, her mother-in-law’s hand on her shoulder, burned on the back of his eyelids. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah, I… Shuri actually figured it out first. She must have had an alert set up for the dummy DNA, in case it started doing something weird. We’re not sure why, but she didn’t get the alert on time for anyone to come over with the IJ. She did send Bruce, though.”

Steve frowned. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He said you were helping Natasha with something urgent,” Bucky said. “I didn’t want to pull you away, so I figured I’d tell you when you were done.”

Steve ran a hand through his hair, letting out a slow breath. He held the phone away from his face for a second as he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to let the wave of anger and fear pass before replying. Finally, he said, “You should have interrupted us.”

“Why, Steve? Bruce and Shuri had me covered, and calling you away from Natasha could have compromised her mission. What difference does it make that you found out now instead of earlier?”

“Because—” and shit, he could not think of an answer, nothing except, “because I care about you, Bucky.”

“I know you do, Steve,” Bucky said, and his voice sounded strained again. “But this is what we are, right? Friends. In this thing together, sure, but friends. And if that’s all— if that’s _what_ we are, then there’s no reason for me to interrupt your possibly life-or-death work with an update when it could just wait.”

Steve stood there for a minute, trying to figure out how to respond. Because Bucky was _right_ , and he hated it. Why did he have to know the minute Bruce and Shuri did? If something had gone worse, someone surely would have alerted him, but since things went fine, it made perfect sense for him to find out about it later. Right?

“I….” he started, completely unsure how to finish the sentence. He felt dazed, disoriented, as his mind tried to make sense of everything he was feeling. Thinking.

“Anyway, if you want to come over, I can catch you up on what Bruce was telling me after I came to about the IJ—”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve agreed, barely listening as his mind raced. The way forward was crystallizing.

“Cool, want to—”

“I’ll come to you,” Steve interrupted, moving decisively toward his motorcycle now.

“Oh. Okay. You alright?” Bucky asked, sounding a little surprised.

“Fine,” Steve assured him. “Gotta go, see you soon.”

He hung up and got on the motorcycle, securing all of his belongings, tugging on his gloves, and fastening his helmet on before tearing off toward Bucky’s apartment. When he arrived in record time, he left the motorcycle and helmet on the curb, thieves be damned, and didn’t even take off his gloves before he was halfway up the stairs, the front gate’s lock mangled.

As soon as Bucky opened the door, Steve crowded inside and into Bucky’s space, shutting the door behind him with one hand and cradling Bucky’s face in his hand with the other. 

“This is why it’s not okay,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut and leaning his forehead against Bucky’s. “I can’t stand it, the thought that I wouldn’t know first. Please.”

“What—”

“Please just tell me I can kiss you.”

A pause, and then, breathless, “Yeah.”

Steve pressed his lips into Bucky’s hungrily, motorcycle gloves dropped to the ground as he pushed him back into the wall of the entryway. It was desperate, more so than any other of Steve’s first kisses, because it wasn’t just desire. It was fear, the realization that he could have missed out on this if things had gone a little differently today. It was regret that he’d been so stupid for so long now, not acting on this feeling sooner. It was terror that this thing eating them both alive might win, and they might not get to do this anymore after that.

And it was so much elation, because finally. Finally.

Edward barked, startling them both out of the kiss. Steve started laughing as Bucky turned to scold his puppy, who clearly just wanted Steve to acknowledge him.

“Oh my god, Edward, I hate you so much right now,” Bucky said, trying to shoo the dog away. Edward barked again.

Steve was still chuckling as he stepped back from Bucky and knelt to greet Edward, who spun in circles and whined excitedly at finally getting some attention. 

“Please stop rewarding my dog’s bad behavior and get back up here to reward mine instead,” Bucky said.

Steve looked up with an arched eyebrow. “Oh? What bad behavior am I rewarding, Sergeant Barnes?”

“Wait before— before this goes any further,” Bucky said, looking as though this physically pained him, “can we talk about it?”

Steve shook his head, standing and moving back into Bucky’s space. “Let’s talk after,” he murmured, pressing his lips into Bucky’s neck. 

Bucky pushed him away. “Seriously, Steve, just… just wait for a second.”

Steve dropped his hands, starting to worry. “Oh— sorry. Sorry. What do you want to talk about?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and grabbed Steve’s hand, pulling him down the hall into the apartment. “You don’t have to be a kicked puppy about it.”

Steve looked over his shoulder at Edward and said, “Did you hear what he said about you?”

Bucky laughed a little as he shoved Steve onto the couch and straddled his lap. “Nobody has ever kicked that dog, and nobody ever will.”

Steve kept his hands off of Bucky, holding them out to the side awkwardly and giving him a confused look. “Okay, I thought we were talking, and now you’re in my lap.”

“Yes,” Bucky said simply, and then sighed exasperatedly. “You can still touch me, dummy.”

Steve put his hands on Bucky’s waist and arched an eyebrow.

Letting out a deep breath, Bucky said, “I just… I want to make sure I know what you meant. When you got here, you said, ‘this is why it’s not okay.’ What did you mean?”

Steve licked his lips, trying to think how to explain. “On the phone, you said we’re friends. But you wouldn’t have had to say that if we weren’t pushing that boundary already, right?”

Bucky nodded, not denying that it had been on his mind.

“And I dunno, it just… it made me realize that we should be more than friends. We should’ve been more than friends a long time ago.”

Steve’s hands slipped under Bucky’s shirt and gently caressed up his sides. Bucky shuddered at the touch, then leaned in and kissed him lightly, slowly. “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” he asked in a whisper as he pulled away, and Steve could tell from his tone he wasn’t asking rhetorically. He wanted an answer.

“Because I’m a coward?” Steve suggested.

“That’s obviously not true.” Bucky looked down. “I’ve wanted this for a long time, Steve. So if this is just some kind of possessive response to not knowing about the lost time—”

“No,” Steve broke in, alarmed. “No. It’s not— I mean, that helped me realize that I’ve been stupid this whole time, but I’ve wanted this since you bought us champagne in San Antonio.”

Bucky’s mouth quirked up into a smile and he lifted his gaze again. “That long?” he asked.

“That long,” Steve said, breathless.

“And what exactly is it you want?”

“Everything,” Steve answered, pulling him close for another, hungrier kiss.

Bucky pulled away a little, managing to say between kisses, “Okay because I— want more— than just sex, so— so— if that’s all—”

“Oh my god, Bucky, can I please help you get out of your head for a few minutes? Let me take care of you now,” Steve murmured as he flipped their positions and laid Bucky onto his back on the couch, then pressed a kiss onto his mouth, “and then we’ll talk about how I’ll take care of you again tomorrow,” a kiss onto his jawline, “and the day after,” his neck, “and the day after that,” his collarbone, “and every day after that, so long as you’ll have me.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very much looking forward to comments and kudos, as always! You all make my day.


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